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/HE DIVINE RIGHT 
OF MISSIONS 



HENRY C. MABIE 



H :! II III [IUI 




Class"E>V- 

Book JM&_ 

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COPYRIGHT DEPOStT: 



THE 

Divine Right 
Of Missions 



Or, CHRISTIANITY THE WORLD- 
RELIGION AND THE RIGHT OF 
THE CHURCH TO PROPAGATE IT 

in Comparatibe Religion 



By 
HENRY G. MABIE 



Philadelphia 

Wbt <§viiiiib & 3Rotolanb $re*tf 

Boston Chicago Atlanta 

New York St. Louis Dallas 



[LIBRARY of OONGK£SSJ 
TwoGopies Beceiwd 

MAY 19 1908 

GoM*n*ni c.ntry . 

Zo 6' * f 1 

JO FY B. 



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Copyright 1908 by the 
American Baptist Publication Society 



Published May, 1908 



jfrom tbe Society's own {press 



preface 

This essay was originally prepared in two 
parts : the former part for the Congress of 
Arts and Sciences of the St. Louis Exposi- 
tion in 1904. That paper was entitled, 
" Elements in Christianity which Adapt 
it to be the Universal and Absolute Relig- 
ion." The latter part was an article in a 
symposium on foreign missions, which ap- 
peared in the " American Journal of The- 
ology," Chicago, in 1907, in answer to the 
question, " Has Christianity the Moral 
Right to Supplant the Ethnic Faiths ? " By 
the kind favor of the editors I have permis- 
sion to use the articles, rewrought in this 
form for a wider use. 

These two studies in the mind of the 
writer were really one study, the latter 
growing out of the former, though origi- 
nally presented in different connections. 

[3] 



W preface 

They belong together. Each finds a larger 
completeness in the other. They are there- 
fore with slight reconstruction and some ad- 
ditional matter here combined as one dis- 
cussion, and offered as a brief apologetic 
for the legitimacy of the extension of Chris- 
tianity into all lands — a matter which in one 
form or another in our time is peculiarly 
engrossing the public mind. 

That the essay may help to commend that 
enterprise which filled the heart and was 
last on the lips of the divine Master prior 
to the Ascension, is the prayer of the author. 

Boston, April i, 1908. H. C. M. 



Contents 



PART I 

Page 

Values in all Religions 8 

Preliminary Considerations n 

The Religion of Human Oneness 13 

The Religion of a Redeeming God 17 

The Survival of the Unfit 24 

Emphasis on Loyalty to Light. 28 

Christianity not Competitive 30 

Such Faith Divinely Attested 35 

The Operation of Grace Not Conterminous 

With Formal Revelation 37 

An Aboriginal Prophet 38 

The Muhsos and their Traditions 40 

Composite Elements in Faith 42 

The Religion of a Person 46 

The Word or Ideal in the Heart 48 

In What Sense God is Immanent 50 

Christ the Object of His Religion 53 

Adequate Authority in Religion 57 

A Doctrine of Providence 59 

Every Man's Life a Plan of God 67 

Aims at the Godlike in Character 70 

[5] 



[6] Contents 



PART II 

Pagb 

Causes of the Questioning 74 

Misleading Assumptions 76 

Ethnic Faiths not Co-ordinate with Chris- 
tianity 77 

Abuse of the Historical Method 78 

A Gospel of Nature Antecedent to All 

Religious Cults 80 

Ethnic Faiths Perversions of the Primitive 

Gospel 81 

Christian Missions More than Legitimate 85 

Missions Misplace Nothing Worthy 87 

False Notions of Rights 91 

Displacement Not Violence 93 

A Deep Imperative in Missions 96 

Striking Testimonies 97 

The Final Question 100 

Christianity Seeks no Conquest of Force. . .102 

Political Embarrassments 104 

The Benign Purpose of Missions 106 

Recapitulation 108 

Moral Transfiguration the Ideal 109 

Appendix 113 



The Divine Right Of 
Missions 



part n 

Gbrfstfanfts tbe Morlb 
TReligton 

IS Christianity the world religion? The 
answer to that question will be the answer 
to many others. This is a day of wide and 
varied study of comparative religion, a mat- 
ter broad as mankind, enduring as time, 
and profound as the needs of man. The 
subject is native to every country, inwoven 
in every epoch of history, and connected 
with every type of thought. " Religion is 
the one elemental and eternal thing in 
man " ; indeed, man has been defined as " an 
animate being with religion." 

[7] 



[8] TEbe Divine IRiQbt 

Vain would be an attempt in this essay to 

deal with more than aspects of the broad 

theme. It is ever wise to 
Values 

tn an recognize elements of truth in 
any phase of religion in what- 
soever form the religious instinct has ex- 
pressed itself, or from whatever source the 
truth may have come. 1 Every form of re- 
ligion, even the crudest fetichism, gives ut- 
terance to some deep hunger of the soul, and 
so hints a thought of God. Every religion 
has an element of value, and its phenomena 
deserve to be carefully registered and pon- 
dered; for example, animism even at its 
lowest holds a belief in the existence of a 
human spirit, in the antagonism of spirits 
good and bad, in the possibility of some sort 
of communion of spirits, and the future 
life of spirits. The savage idolater may not 
always worship the symbol before which he 

1 Doubtless many of those truer elements which are 
found in the ethnic religions are survivals of a primitive 
but lost revelation. For example, an ancient representa- 
tion of Vishnu in Hinduism presented a figure with a 
serpent coiled about it, but with the serpent's head beneath 
Vishnu's heel. Can there be any doubt of the biblical 
origin of that conception? 



of gMggtong [9] 

bows. He may simply try to realize and 
localize the spirit which he fears. The rude 
African who would not complete a bargain 
with the European trader until he had time 
to go and bring his fetich which he had for- 
gotten, is far more to be commended than 
the modern nominal Christian who essays 
to conduct his business apart from his pro- 
fession of Christ ; nay, the African, in loy- 
alty to his untutored conscience, reads a 
needed lesson to all such as have forgotten 
that God has the most intimate relation to 
all business, including one's share in re- 
sponsibility for corporate acts, be they good 
or bad. 

In the Rig- Veda of the Hindus are found 
evidences of the sovereignty and omnipres- 
ence of the Deity, and the ancient religion 
records many a cry after immortality. Brah- 
manism with all its grossness is in some re- 
spects at least a non-materialistic religion. 
It seeks to fit the spirit by endless transmi- 
grations for a future life. Buddhism repre- 
sents a half-truth, viz., that to find blessed- 



[iq] XZbe Mvinc TRtgbt 

ness the soul must lose its life. Its funda- 
mental defect is that unlike Christianity, it 
does not show how through losing its sinful 
self-life, it may find its diviner life in Christ. 
And Buddhism has its Kwan Yin, who some 
think is a survival although in a grotesque 
form of early traditions of the Christ, and 
even of the Logos-doctrine of St. John. 
At all events Kwan Yin is a sort of idealiza- 
tion of the divine mercy such as was not 
suspected a generation ago as existing in 
heathen literature or history. 

Confucianism deals nobly with the man- 
ward duties embraced in the second table 
of the Mosaic law. It teaches the reform 
of personal life, some sort of regulation of 
the family, and the correction of certain 
social and political abuses. Of course it is 
agnostic as to God, and yet in the very 
effort to escape God it substitutes nature 
and ancestor-worship. 

The Zendavesta entertains a dualism of 
principles embracing the conflict between 
good and evil, but hoping for ultimate con- 



of flfltggiong [n] 

quest of the evil by the good. But each of 
these systems has disastrously failed to 
morally elevate the masses of the people who 
have been its adherents, even after many 
centuries of trial. And that some of these 
systems have absolutely corrupted rather 
than elevated the peoples who have been 
under their influence is the verdict of 
thoughtful students of these religions in 
many lands. There are, to say the least, fatal 
defects in them all, defects which caricature 
the Deity, grossly debase their subjects, and 
in other ways render them insufficient to 
meet the deeper needs of man, while Chris- 
tianity alone embraces all the good found in 
these various systems, with none of their 
evils. 

What I present in the first part of this 
discussion is a study preliminary to the jus- 
tification of Christian missions. 
For, as Mr. Balfour says of e ~ Tn. 
theology, so may it be said of 
missions, that " the decisive battles are 
fought beyond its frontiers." It is not over 



["] XTbe 2>i\>fne TRtabt 

matters purely missionary that the rights 
of missions are lost or won. The judgments 
we form upon the special problems of mis- 
sions are commonly settled for us by our 
prepossessions — by our general mode of 
looking at Christianity itself. So in our talk 
about missions, to use a phrase of Emer- 
son's, " we say what we ought to say," 
according as we are Christian, modo-Chris- 
tian, or anti-Christian. At bottom, the prob- 
lem of Christian missions is only the prob- 
lem of the extension of Christianity. How 
aggressively, how discreetly, or in what 
forms we are to do it, are secondary matters. 
The human methods whereby Christianity 
is extended anywhere, always with more or 
less variation and imperfectness, are the 
methods of missions. 

My present object is to point out in Chris- 
tianity those characteristics which constitu- 
tionally and reasonably commend it to uni- 
versal trial, and therefore to universal and 
aggressive propagation. 

By Christianity, I mean of course Chris- 



of fifliggions [13] 

tianity as it is in itself, as it came uncor- 
rupted from the hand of its author; Chris- 
tianity as separated from all those perver- 
sions and exaggerations which have become 
superimposed upon it through the igno- 
rance, narrowness, or perversity of its ad- 
herents. I mean Christianity in its irredu- 
cible minimum. For such a Christianity we 
must go back of all historic forms, back of 
all existing creedal statements, to the apos- 
tolic mind in revelation itself. 

We now turn to an examination into 
those elements which adapt it to hold the 
controlling place which we claim for it, as 
the true universal and absolute religion. 

The first characteristic we note is the em- 
phasis which Christianity puts upon the es- 
sential oneness of man. The 

Ube 1Reli0fon 
account of man's creation in ofiHuman 

Genesis, the implications in- 
volved in the act of the dispersion at Babel, 
the twofold Adamic race headship of man- 
kind, the insistence on the duty of mutual 
love among all men, and the goal toward 



[i4] TEbe Divine IRtpbt 

which renewed humanity moves in the glori- 
fied civic unity of the New Jerusalem, all 
testify to the divine conception of man as 
one. That this has been only partially be- 
lieved and accepted is sadly true. Since the 
first act of unbelief, logically resulting in 
the slaying of Abel by Cain his brother, 
schism and strife have characterized the 
long story of man's relation to man. The 
tyranny of the elder over the younger, of the 
strong over the weak, of kings over sub- 
jects, and of caste over caste, has disas- 
trously prevailed until this hour, and is at 
the root of the wars and woes of society. 

The great epochal reforms among men 
have always turned upon some aspect of 
man's brotherly duty to his fellow. The 
passing of the feudal system, the establish- 
ment of the Great Charter of England, the 
Reformation under Luther, the rise of the 
American Republic, the abolition of slavery, 
and the freeing of the Western Hemisphere 
from medieval intolerance and bigotry, all 
were grounded in a return toward the Bible 



of naiggtong [15] 

conception of the oneness of man. Jesus 
Christ set forth this deep oneness in this 
fashion : The Herodians and Pharisees had 
combined in a plot to ensnare him. They 
approached the Master with the subtle flat- 
tery : " Teacher, we know that thou art 
true, and teachest the way of God in truth, 
and carest not for any one; for thou re- 
gardest not the person of men. Tell us 
therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it law- 
ful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?" 
(Matt. 22 : 16, 17.) In his answer to this 
cunning flattery Christ seized upon the in- 
itial suggestion : " Thou regardest not the 
person of men," literally, " Thou lookest not 
into the face of men." And so he replied: 
" Shew me the tribute money " — the Roman 
denarius appointed for the tax. This coin 
had on its one side the face of Tiberius Cae- 
sar, suggestive of civic responsibility; and 
on the obverse side the figure of a priest, 
suggesting religious relations. Looking 
then full upon the face of Caesar, Jesus said : 
" You tell me I do not look upon the face 



[i6] Ube 2)it)tne TRtgbt 

of men. Whose face is this upon which I 
am now looking, and the superscription 
whose?" They say unto him, " Caesar's." 
Then said Jesus : " Render therefore unto 
Caesar the things which are Caesar's " — the 
things which have Caesar's imprint on them, 
" and unto God the things which are God's " 
— the things which have his imprint on 
them (ver. 21). Thus Christ looked upon 
man's face, not superficially, not one- 
sidedly, as did both the Herodians and the 
Pharisees: he pierced to the deep, divine, 
composite pattern for man; he looked not 
upon the mere accidents of color or race or 
artificial station by which we are wont to 
gauge and value men; he looked to man's 
fundamental constitution, and saw him as 
his Father saw him, not as Teuton, Mon- 
golian, African, or Saxon ; but man as man, 
man as the offspring of God, man as the 
subject of eternal redemption. Looking 
upon the face of man in such sense, Jesus 
contemplated the reminting of the coin, so 
that the clearness of the original image de- 



of missions [17] 

faced by sin might be restored. Thus Jesus 
viewed man in his integral, ideal, potential 
completeness ; and thus we are slowly learn- 
ing to view him. Thus all reform must 
view him if it accomplishes its mission. 

At this point then, Christianity as cher- 
ishing the highest hope conceivable respect- 
ing the reuniting of all social and political 
schisms of men into one society of brothers 
— a communion of saints, something far 
deeper than a mere " federation of man " — 
has in it the highest claim to universal ac- 
ceptance. 

But again, Christianity is adapted to be- 
come the final religion through the accent 
it places upon the redemptive 

principle in its idea of God. of a 

~. . Ifteoecming <So& 

Other religions have their 

idea of deity as representing power, intelli- 
gence, will, moral character, and judgment; 
but Christianity alone has at the very heart 
of its conception of Deity the principle and 
potency of recovery from moral evil. 

The Bible, indeed, on its first pages defi- 

B 



[is] XTbe Divine IRigbt 

nitely records the sin and fall of man, how- 
ever that fall may be construed; and 
straight through to the end it accentuates 
the sad reality. Even without a Bible, men 
of all times and races are aware of their sad 
condition in this respect. Let men philoso- 
phize as they may to explain away sin, yet 
after all they recognize at least " a con- 
tinuous abnormality " in the life of man. 
At the best man's life is " an ever not-quite," 
a falling short, a missing of the mark. 
Christianity, however, presents this un- 
paralleled characteristic that, while frankly 
recognizing the mystery of man's sin, it yet 
holds out hope of recovery from it, and 
offers a method of God to accomplish it. 

This purpose to redeem is set forth in the 
Bible as anterior to the purpose even to 
create, and to permit the fall. Had it not 
been so, the risk of the fall would not have 
been incurred. The atonement is never to 
be thought of as an after-thought ; it is al- 
ways in revelation God's forethought, in 
which all his relations to a race of created 



ot fBlfggfong [19] 

men started ; it is the ground purpose of the 
universe. The sacrificed Christ is ever " the 
Lamb foreknown (as slain) from the foun- 
dation of the world " (Rev. 13 : 8). 

The Creator himself from the beginning 
purposed to become potentially responsible 
for man's foreseen sin, in such a way as to 
make possible his glorious recovery from it, 
and his permanent establishment in positive 
holiness. That there is such a thing as 
" original sin " is indeed true. But we are 
coming to see that, even back of the incip- 
ient sin, God provided what may be called 
an " original grace " also, a grace inchoate 
indeed, until man by his own free will 
should respond to it and make it his own, 
but still an original provision, adequate to 
more than cancel the effects of original sin. 
The fathers used to maintain the doctrine of 
" total depravity," and a most misunder- 
stood and even misleading expression it has 
ever been. There is certainly a sense in 
which man through sin has fallen into a sad 
bias toward evil. His power for good has 



[go] Zbc g)iv>ine IRtgbt 

been blighted at the root ; there is " a black- 
drop in the blood " ; and this is transmissible 
in heredity. Now, however, in the light of a 
better understanding of Christ as the eternal 
Logos, and his relation from-ever-of-old to 
our humanity, we are coming to see that if 
there was in some sense a deep racial " de- 
pravity," this is not the whole fact. There 
is also revealed in the Scriptures in close 
relation to it, nay, over against it, a racial 
inchoate redemption as well. There is 
stored up in Christ's person and work, as 
potential for us a redemption deeper down 
at root than the acknowledged depravity. 
There is in Christ a potential new heredity 
in grace, an heredity that actually goes into 
effect for all who die in infancy or in in- 
fantine conditions, like the feeble-minded 
and many of the heathen, and which would 
also become effective in all others were it 
not that by an act of evil self-will this poten- 
tiality is repudiated. This is most certainly 
implied in the teaching of Paul in the fifth 
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. The 



of Emissions [21] 

redemption there spoken of is potentially- 
racial as well as individual. In Paul's teach- 
ing two Adams are set forth, and the first 
Adam in whom the race went down is rep- 
resented as a mere figure, totioq (type), or 
shadow of the great reality, the coming sec- 
ond Adam in whom the race was to have 
" more than " a recovery from sin (Rom. 5 : 
14). Five times in the course of the argu- 
ment in the context, redemption through 
the second Adam is declared to be " much 
more " than a restoration to the rudimental 
state of the unf alien first Adam (Rom. 5 : 
9, 10, 15, 17, 20). The emphasis conveyed in 
these " much mores," the accumulating 
ever-blessed promise of them, as indicating 
how much deeper the possibilities of the 
new heredity of grace are than the old he- 
redity of evil, has far too long been over- 
looked or ignored in evangelical thought 
and teaching. " Where sin abounded, grace 
did abound more exceedingly " (Rom. 5 : 
20, A. S. V.). 
Such grace is exclusively a conception of 



[22] ZEbe Divine IRfgbt 

the Christian Scriptures, and men who are 
destitute of the Bible, or who reject it, are 
wholly without any such assurance in Deity. 
The utmost the pagan mind can do is to 
cherish the hope that there may be some- 
where, although as yet unknown, some such 
being as we have described, some Redeem- 
er. Many a heathen who has never had any 
satisfactory assurance that there is a God 
of mercy knows from the hunger of his own 
heart that " there ought to be such a God," 
as a pagan Chinese once remarked on hear- 
ing described for the first time the love of 
God in Jesus Christ. 

As opposed to this, how hopeless and 
cruel are all ideas of God to which we are 
shut up by the mere agnostic ideas of the 
day. In the bald Darwinian doctrine of " the 
survival of the fittest," e. g., what hope is 
there for the unfit of our race ? Yet the un- 
fit are in the majority. It is the nine-tenths 
instead of the one-tenth that are submerged. 
It is the glory of the Christian religion that 
" the Son of man is come to seek and to save 



ot flQissiong [23] 

tliat which was lost" (Luke 19 : 10). It 
is idle to talk of mercy in the Bible sense 
apart from the Bible idea of the redeeming 
God. Men who shut themselves up to the 
cold logic of unaided philosophy cannot en- 
tertain mercy for themselves or others. 
Said the late Cecil Rhodes in his last hours : 
"So much to be done, and yet so little ac- 
complished." And can one wonder that so 
despairing a note was upon his lips when the 
first and last article of his creed is said to 
have been this: "I believe in Force Al- 
mighty, the ruler of the universe, working 
scientifically, through natural selection, to 
bring about the survival of the fittest and the 
elimination of the unfittest ? " 

Such a one in the moral school has not ad- 
vanced as far as the poor Chinese above re- 
ferred to, who believed " there ought to be 
such a God ! " With all his colossal power 
Cecil Rhodes had not yet got into the class 
of that rare disciple of nature, Helen Keller, 
who, when Bishop Brooks was giving her 
the first definitive lesson about God, is said 



[24] TEbe S)l\>ine TRiabt 

to have responded, with a face aglow with 
wonder, "Is that God? I have always 
known him, but until now I did not know 
his name." 

The scientific conception of the survival 
of the fittest can never be accepted as apply- 
ing to the spiritual relations of 

Ube Survival & r 

of man, for the reason that it 

characteristically conceives 01 
man as on the animal level only. On the 
physical plane it is true that nature brings 
into being more creatures, as it does ani- 
mals, than can be educated into permanent 
well-being. Thus conceived of, the individ- 
ual is of account as the mere natural pro- 
genitor of a better race — in order to im- 
prove the breed ; and failing to do this mere 
nature tends to put an end to man as she 
does to the animalculse. The race of man 
thus viewed as a kind, has no original and 
enduring relation to the infinite One. Says 
Dr. George A. Gordon : " Such a view of 
election to life covers only the few finest 
specimens and reprobates the overwhelming 



of fltitsslong [25] 

majority among the lower races to death. 
This is the new Calvinism that is tempting 
thinkers. It is the Calvinism (I should say 
the hyper-Calvinism) of nature, elaborated 
from the method of the universe with animal 
life which, when applied to man, is the 
translation of the method of the brute world 
into the human world." Humanity is thus 
" an ideal which a few are born to com- 
pass, but which for men in general is a 
hopeless impossibility.'' 

Dr. A. H. Bradford, in commenting on 
the severity of the Darwinian interpretation 
of the survival of the fittest, is reported once 
to have said substantially : " If I were given 
to choose being left in the hands of the 
law of the survival of the fittest, and being 
placed in the hands of the God even of Ed- 
wards' famous sermon entitled, ' Sinners in 
the Hands of an Angry God,' I would much 
prefer the latter." So pessimistic a view of 
human life as that represented by Dar- 
win's law of the survival of the fittest, thank 
God, is not the view of Christianity; for 



[26] XTbe g)tx>tne TRlgbt 

Christianity regards humanity as not merely 
animal, but made in the image of God also, 
belonging to a commonwealth of moral 
worth, with the possibilities of redeemed 
spiritual being. Hence, all the unfit may 
pass into the higher stage of existence and 
so, as precious to God, may survive; and 
more than survive: they may be redeemed. 
It will be recalled that the late Prof. 
George J. Romanes, when he returned to 
Christian faith after a long period of ag- 
nostic doubt, acknowledged that at the ear- 
lier period of his scientific studies he " did 
not sufficiently appreciate the immense im- 
portance of human nature, as distinguished 
from physical nature, in any inquiry touch- 
ing theism." He himself says : " But since 
that early time I have seriously studied an- 
thropology, including the science of com- 
parative religions, psychology, and meta- 
physics, with the result of clearly seeing that 
human nature is the most important part of 
nature as a whole, whereby to investigate 
the theory of theism." " This," Romanes 



of missions [27] 

says, " I ought to have anticipated on merely 
a priori grounds, and no doubt should have 
perceived had I not been too much immersed 
in merely physical research." 

It may be added that this eminent man, 
for so many years a close follower of Dar- 
win, was led to this new appreciation of hu- 
man nature — the chief part of nature — 
through correspondence with a Christian 
missionary, who had also attained a distinc- 
tion in the realm of natural science. I refer 
to Dr. John T. Gulick, now of Honolulu, 
and with whom the present writer had a per- 
sonal interview last spring concerning this 
very matter. On far deeper principles than 
physical science even at its best has ever 
contemplated, cannibals of interior Africa 
and the South Seas, the pariahs of India, 
counted by their tyrannical superiors as the 
offscouring of the earth, and many morally 
bankrupt tribes of people have survived by 
myriads, and are the glorious trophies of 
Christian missions, even of Christ himself, 
who is the Saviour of the lost, the Re- 



[28] XTbe S)ix>ine TRiQbt 

deemer of all types of human failure and 
social disorder. A religion which can pro- 
duce such a saving reversal of human pros- 
pects and conditions is adapted to find wel- 
come and prevalence on a universal scale. 

But a third ground of confidence for be- 
lieving that Christianity is adapted to be- 
come the universal and abso- 

Empbasis on 
XosaitE lute religion is in the valuation 

placed by it upon faith, or the 
principle of loyalty to light. It is because 
of faith considered as loyalty to light that 
the soul may be encouraged to make an in- 
stant beginning anywhere, with whatever 
measure of truth it has, in the school of 
Christ. This idea, of the relation of in- 
stant action to any degree of light as an act 
of faith, has not always prevailed, and is 
even now far from universal in the common 
Christian thought. There are those who 
hold that in order to the existence of faith 
in any biblical sense, there must first be in 
the mind a certain intellectual concept or 
set of concepts, which as such must be dog*- 



of missions [29] 

matically believed, before the soul can have 
saving faith. 

Such a position assumes that faith is 
primarily and essentially an intellectual be- 
lief: belief in a doctrine about God, or 
Christ, or the Bible. But this is far from 
the truth concerning Christian faith. There 
is a place for intellectual beliefs, but this 
in the school of method is both before and 
after the personal saving faith of which 
we now are speaking. It goes without say- 
ing that in any rational being, the soul must 
start with a certain stock of elementary be- 
liefs or intuitions; and other things being 
equal, intellectual beliefs will always in- 
crease and clarify as Christian experience 
enlarges and deepens. 

Saving faith at its heart, however, is a 
moral attitude. It is the collective execu- 
tive attitude and ultimately the act of the 
entire being. As such, therefore, any soul 
anywhere, whatever its degree of intelli- 
gence or light, is capable of exercising faith 
in principle the moment it is appealed to. 



Q3 XEbe Btvfne TRtflbt 

Christianity alone among religions takes 
note of so elemental a thing. Christianity 
accommodates itself to man's present mental 
furnishings, irrespective of his own religious 
classification of himself. Christ in his school 
requires of no soul more than one step at a 
time, and that step a relative one in view of 
all the conditions it faces. It is in my be- 
lief at this point that many Christians sadly, 
narrowly misunderstand their own religion, 
and often place the cart before the horse in 
their initial appeals to men. This embar- 
rasses Christianity and retards its accept- 
ance. 

So also it is a tactical mistake in the win- 
ning of adherents to put Christianity as a 
philosophy over against any 

Cbrfstianit2 

•not other form of religion as a 

philosophy in the rivalry of a 
debate. Those who proceed as if Chris- 
tianity were a competitive religion always 
do so to the damage of Christianity; they 
misrepresent its spirit and distort its 
method. Christianity is not in the field to 



of missions |>] 

gain a partisan mental victory. Such vic- 
tories as Christianity wins, it wins from in- 
trinsic, unselfish desert, because it comple- 
ments the limited or vitalizes the expiring 
hope in other systems. Christianity never 
seeks victory for any selfish ends, but be- 
cause of its genuine and quenchless love for 
those whom it would win from error and 
short-sightedness ; it " came not to destroy 
but to fulfill " (Matt. 5 : 17). It comes as 
sunrise comes, not to disparage the morn- 
ing star, but to bring on the day. 

What the seeker after God chiefly needs 
is to find the clue which will lead to the 
truth absolute at the end of the search. No 
soul conditioned in this world as it is, really 
ever does much more than follow such a 
clue, with some aberrations, to the solutions 
of the mysteries involved in his religion. 
And so the central task of the soul-winner 
is to put the soul on the clue to better things. 
It is not the first business of the Christian 
teacher to furnish a creedal religion, ready- 
made with answers to peculiarly speculative 



[32] TEbe g)iv>tne TRiflbt 

queries, but rather to put and keep men on 
this practical " clue./' as we have called it. 
He is to hint the immediate next step, and 
then the successive steps toward the experi- 
mental knowledge of Christ himself, and 
later to a philosophy about Christ. There is 
a place for a philosophy, for theology, but 
this place is secondary. Christ is always 
within personal touch of every soul even 
though the soul knows it not; and by 
pressing inopportunely our opinions about 
Christ we may widen an existing chasm of 
separation when we should close it. Real 
touch with Christ is received through the 
inducement of the right personal attitude, 
in the light one has, toward his ideal. The 
Apostle John calls this ideal "the Word," 
or Christ, that light " which lighteth every 
man coming into the world" (John 1:9), 
the omnipresent living Redeemer. It was 
this Christ the primitive church so inti- 
mately knew. 

To assume this willing attitude toward 
one's ideal is faith, a faith which is morally 



of flfltggiong [33] 

rather than intellectually conditioned. 1 Our 
will has no power of itself to effect in the 
soul the sense of the essential Christ. The 
will, however, can negative the living lie 
which controls the life wherein sin rules it, 
and the moment this is done, the Spirit of 
Christ rushes to the soul's confessed help- 
lessness and effects faith in him. As nature 
abhors a vacuum, so Christ loathes a spirit- 
ual void in a human being. The moment, in 
the light one has, the will bids a sin vacate 
the heart's throne, that moment the Spirit 
of Christ with infinite eagerness rushes in to 
fill the void. God's interest in conferring 
grace is vastly greater than man's in ac- 
cepting it. 

Says Dr. Hermann Cremer : " The won- 
drous counter-effect of God against man's 
sin is indeed a supernatural thing, the abso- 
lutely inconceivable to human philosophy; 
it is different from anything which else- 
where or otherwise ever takes place or can 

1 For a fuller discussion of this important matter see 
the author's " Method in Soul- Winning," Chap. IV, pub- 
lished by Fleming H. Revell Co., New York. 



[34] TEbe Divine IRtQbt 

take place. This is the interior profound 
reality of the Christian religion." And it is 
due to the fact that Christianity is a religion 
of grace — a religion which takes the initia- 
tive with the guilty and the undeserving. 

Now assuming that this beginning in 
Christian experience, which we have called 
the entrance on the clue to the experimental 
realization of the Christ, has taken place, 
Christianity depends for its deeper, maturer, 
intellectual apprehension of what has oc- 
curred, upon the retrospect of such an ex- 
perience, as the mind of the regenerated 
one, like a waking dreamer, casts its eye 
backward over the course so mysteriously 
traversed. 

At this point the Holy Scriptures also, 
with indispensable value meet a profound 
need. They bring out into consciousness, as 
they also explain to the understanding, what 
has occurred; and they afford a basis on 
which further and yet clearer subjective ex- 
periences may be had. Here is a large place 
for objective, even external truth — that 



of flftiggions [35] 

truth which in some modern thinking is so 
much disparaged, or quite ignored, for ex- 
ample, in some forms of the Ritschlian 
theology. 

Moreover, it is important and reinforc- 
ing to faith to remember that this loyalty 
to light which Christianity 

ffattb ©Mitels so values receives from its 
Bttestefc t . . . 1 .. 

divine Author a peculiar attes- 
tation. It is not always indeed, and with all 
temperaments, at once consciously attested 
in an emotional way; but in fact, and par- 
ticularly in the after history of the believer, 
this faith is so attested. The eleventh chap- 
ter of Hebrews would seem to have been 
written expressly to emphasize this. In that 
chapter faith is declared to be " the proving 
of things not seen " ; the Margin reads, 
" the test " (Heb. 11 : 1, R. V.). As Abel, 
Abraham, Moses, and others put God's 
promises to the test, he attested them by 
the altered forms which their after-history 
took on. Therein all the elders were well-at- 
tested — " had witness borne to them " (Heb. 



[36] Ube Mvinc TRtgbt 

ii : 2, 4, 5, 39, R. V.)- So also all men of 
faith in one form or another have " had 
witness borne to them." Were it not so 
God would deny himself. 

This attestation would come to him who 
follows the light of nature, although in a 
different degree, as really as to him who 
follows the light of revelation, because the 
God of nature and of revelation are one 
and the same being. Christ speaks as really, 
though with less distinctness in the voice 
of natural conscience as in his written word, 
because the conscience with all other created 
things is constructed according to Christ, 
the true norm of creation. The conscience 
indeed, as well as other powers of the 
natural man, is weakened or perverted by 
sin, and needs to be renewed and quickened, 
corrected and educated by the Holy Spirit 
through the written word. The voice of 
Christ speaks in the conscience, however 
obscurely; and to follow that conscience, 
though imperfectly, is of the spirit of 
faith. 



of missions [37] 

It is the misfortune of traditional Chris- 
tianity that it is yet supposed by some of its 
followers that the operation of 

divine grace is conterminous ^ bc ©Potion 

of ©race not 
with the limited area in which Conterminous 

^ . ljL , witb formal 

the Scriptures are known; uuveiation 
that faith and experience in 
themselves cannot exist except where Bible 
knowledge exists. To this extent Chris- 
tianity has narrowly and mistakenly alien- 
ated from itself much territory which really 
belongs to it. It is the first function of 
Christian revelation to bring to light what 
is in the spiritual realm; for example, life 
and immortality, the love of God in Christ, 
and the suspended judgment on sin. Paul 
says it was given to him as the apostle to 
the Gentiles, " To make all men see what is 
the dispensation of the mystery which for 
ages hath been hid in God" (Eph. 3:9). 
But the existence of every form of grace, 
at least potentially, was before revelation 
and independent of it. It is of the realities, 
and not of the explanation or the enrich- 



[3«] Ubc Divine TRiabt 

ment of them, we speak. " In the beginning 
was the Word, and the Word was with God, 
and the Word was God" (John I : i). 

We believe that the period of long wait- 
ing for converts on many a mission field 
might be amazingly reduced if this matter 
of which we are speaking were better under- 
stood and effort were more skilfully applied. 
By endeavoring at first to lay too extensive 
an intellectual groundwork for a later prop- 
agation of doctrine, the missionary may 
altogether obscure the more primary and 
elementary basis of faith, namely, the pres- 
ent light possessed. 

In the account of David's Brainerd's work 

among the Delaware Indians, he speaks of 

Hn a remarkable priest, a reform- 

Hborigfnai er w ho had been " strangely 
Ipropbet 

moved to devote his life to an 

endeavor to restore the ancient religion of 

the Indians." 1 " He was grotesquely dressed 

in Indian fashion, but he was evidently de- 

1 This incident is substantially quoted from the 
author's " Method in Soul- Winning," published by 
Revell, N. Y. 



of nntsstong [39] 

vout." He lamented freely the degenerate 
condition of the Indians, and said that 
" their ignorance and wickedness had so 
troubled him sometimes that he had felt 
driven to the woods in the solitariness of his 
distress for them." At length God would 
comfort his heart and show him what he 
should do, whereupon he would return to 
his associates and love and labor for them 
as never before. While Brainerd was dis- 
cussing with him, at times he would say, 
" Now that I like, so God taught me." This 
reformer had a doctrine " that departed 
souls all went southward," with this differ- 
ence, that " the good were admitted into a 
beautiful town with spiritual walls, or walls 
agreeable to the nature of souls, and that 
the latter would forever hover near those 
walls, and in vain attempt to get in." Brain- 
erd testifies that this man was sincere, hon- 
est, and conscientious, according to his own 
religious opinions, as no other pagan he had 
seen. He labored earnestly to banish the 
drink habit among the Indians ; but by his 



[40] XTbe Divine TRigbt 

followers for the most part he was regarded 
as " a precise zealot," and his efforts were 
unheeded. 

It would thus appear that in the heart of 
this nature-taught savage was the spirit of 
faith, existing with most limited light. It 
needed further instruction to give it such 
form and power as would enable it to grasp 
the large concept of " salvation " ; but the 
germ of the new righteousness of faith 
evidently was there, before the missionary 
came with his message. It was the function 
of the missionary to instruct and develop 
that germinal faith to bring it to intelligence 
and power. How far even Brainerd did 
this, we are not told. 

Within the past few years considerable 
tribes of people akin to the Karens have 

Ube mubso* been found h y missionaries in 
an5 ubefr Eastern Burma, and over the 

UraMtions 

borders in China and Siam. 
They are known as Muhsos, Was, and 
Kwes. 1 They give evidence of having 

1 See Appendix. 



of flQtggfong [41] 

somehow been taught an elementary faith 
in a gospel to come. They have for years 
been waiting for the coming of foreign 
teachers who they believed would teach 
them of the true God. There have even 
been developed among them religious teach- 
ers, nature-taught or spirit-taught, who have 
served to keep alive and foster their higher 
hopes. These people were found wearing 
cotton cords about their necks and on their 
wrists, marks of their separateness from 
their heathen neighbors, and in part spirit- 
ually symbolic of the bonds in which they 
were consciously held until they should be 
freed by their expected emancipators. 

It is needless to say that wise missionaries 
among such a people would at once begin 
their work by fostering and explaining this 
incipient faith in the essential divine re- 
demption which had been previously ac- 
cepted in its elementary accents. So the 
missionaries among them are doing ; and al- 
ready in this one field several thousand con- 
verts have been baptized and are being dis- 



[42] XTbe SHvine IRtgbt 

cipled to the Christ of the New Testament. 

Doubtless many illustrations similar to 
this among heathen peoples exist, if they 
were known, and if known appreciated. If 
so, they are evidence of the at-homeness of 
Christ's religion among all men everywhere. 
Moreover, Christianity is a religion which 
by its very nature, so far from being hidden 
from the discernment of the simple-minded 
whose intellectual horizon is limited, is a re- 
ligion which in its central principle cannot 
be apprehended by the intellect alone, how- 
ever well it may be instructed even by the 
Bible. 

Christianity as apprehensible to faith re- 
quires the right use of other faculties of the 

Composite sou * Des ^ es tne intellect : such 
Elements in as the conscience, the feelings, 
the imagination, and above all 
the will. The entire composite soul must be 
open. The living God cannot authenticate 
himself to the mere fragment of a man, even 
though that fragment be his majestic reason. 
In the mere action of the understanding, the 



of flflfssiong [43] 

executive soul puts itself in reality outside 
the truth, and simply speculates. One needs 
to move by an act of will inside the truth 
with all the love of the heart, and with all 
the moral sense of the conscience. He who 
does this with due regard to objective 
truth and in the right subjective attitude 
finds reality. The agnosticism of the world 
is the natural outcome of a mistaken in- 
tellectual self-sufficiency, a species of intel- 
lect-worship. To such self-sufficiency there 
is and can be no valid religious author- 
ity. The biographer of George J. Romanes 
tells us that as he drew near the end of life 
he reproached himself for what he called 
" sins of the intellect, mental arrogance, and 
undue regard for intellectual supremacy." 
Romanes then clearly saw the principle we 
have enunciated, that faith in the Christian 
sense is essentially a right moral attitude to 
the light one has irrespective of its degree 
or source. It could not be otherwise than 
that those who close moral avenues of the 
soul in the interest of " speculative suprem- 



[44] TTbe Divine TRfgbt 

acy," should blindly miss the way to God. 
It is of such blindness of heart that our 
Lord spoke when he said : " Thou didst hide 
these things from the wise and understand- 
ing, and didst reveal them unto babes " 
(Matt. 12 : 25). The essential difference 
in habit of mind between the babe — the child 
mind — and the creature of intellectual pru- 
dence, the philosophic mind, is this, that the 
babe brings its whole composite being into 
action, and the philosopher but a fragment 
of his being. Now Christianity risks every- 
thing as to its self-evidencing power with 
him who will put its proposals to the experi- 
mental test. In this respect the method of 
Christianity is in line with the inductive 
method in the physical sciences. It puts the 
inquirer into the laboratory as if he were a 
chemist with his elemental substances, his 
crucibles, dynamos, test tubes, etc., and says, 
" Now by personal experimentation enter 
into relations with the God of grace ; use his 
means of grace, and get your experienced 
results. Those results you will find to cor- 



of fliliggtong [45] 

respond with the true and worthy dog- 
matics, or theorems of your text-books ; and 
wherein they do not, you must revise your 
theories." Thus Christianity shines in its 
own light. As thus relying upon its self- 
evidencing power, Christianity can afford to 
appeal instantly, everywhere, to all types of 
earnest life, without fear of any rival. Its 
practical difficulty indeed, is to secure in 
human nature the teachableness that will 
really test it. When, however, this is se- 
cured, and the test is applied, the divine at- 
testation is always forthcoming, and there 
results an experience of a reality which is 
self-approving. 

But lest in placing such emphasis upon 
this matter of the value of a believing atti- 
tude toward the measure of light possessed, 
it be thought that this is too subjective, we 
pass on to say that there is a complementary 
truth undoubtedly needed; and this also is 
supplied by Christianity through the presen- 
tation of its eternal and personal Christ, as 
the adequate object of faith. Faith — Chris- 



[46] Ttbe Divine TRfQbt 

tain faith in its complete sense — does de- 
mand an adequate external object upon 
which to rest, as well as a right internal 
attitude. 

And here Christianity meets the case, for 
Christianity is objectively the religion of 

ube -Kelson a P ers on. Christianity is 

of a Christ, the personal Christ, 

person 

In saying this, however, it 
must be remembered that this Christ was 
present in the universe as "the essential 
Christ," 1 just as really and even personally 
so, before the historic incarnation as after. 
As his personality, however, came to ex- 
pression in the incarnation, thus only could 
Christ be satisfactorily known. The de- 
gree of knowledge of this person, whether 
with or without revelation, may and does 
vary widely. Some may not know his name 
at all, like Socrates or Seneca, or Melchize- 
dek, or Helen Keller in the early stages of 
her religious musings. Of course, other 

1 The apotheosis of wisdom in Prov. 8 has long been 
considered as a form of description of this essential Christ. 



oi miisgions [47] 

things being equal, the more perfectly 
Christ's name — as explaining his redeeming 
work — is apprehended by the intelligence, 
the better for a faith that would be robust. 
The point to be noted, however, is that the 
Christ of the New Testament is one and the 
same person with " the essential Christ," the 
external Logos of eternity. He has always 
been existent in the universe, with his re- 
deeming purpose. All things were created 
by him and for him, and all things consist 
or hold together in him. So far as any one 
has been saved, as multitudes in the old 
economy, previous to the full revelation 
of Christ, doubtless were saved in some 
degree, they were saved on the basis of the 
eternal incipient atonement of God-in- 
Christ. 1 " Neither is there salvation in any 

1 Of course such a conception of salvation is a most 
inadequate one as compared with that which the New 
Testament sets forth. It is at the best but embryonic, 
and far from satisfies any ideal worthy of a Bible- 
enlightened Christian or an intelligent missionary passion; 
but it is folly to deny an infantine faith where it is found 
to exist, and he grossly misinterprets our God if one 
represent him as inappreciative of it. (Jonah 4 : 10, 11; 
Acts 10 : 35.) 



[48] ftbe 5Hvlne TRfgbt 

other" (Acts 4 : 12). He was first re- 
vealed as "the seed of the woman" (Gen. 
3 : 15), and later to Israel by his memorial 
name, " Yahweh," or " Jehovah," " the one 
who will be " (Exod. 3 : 14). At length he 
was fully disclosed in the actual incarnation. 
But he was ever " the Ancient of days " 
(Dan. 7 : 13). "In the beginning was the 
Word" (John 1:1). He was that light 
" which lighteth every man coming into the 
world" (John 1:9). He was that su- 
preme personified ideal of all lesser forms 
of ideal by whomsoever or wherever cher- 
ished. 

Says Paul in his letter to the Romans: 
" But the righteousness of faith saith thus, 

Ube TIDlor& or Sa ^ not in thine heart > Wh ° 

n&eai fn shall ascend into heaven ? (that 
tbe Heart v 

is, to bring Christ down:) 

or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that 

is, to bring Christ up from the dead.) But 

what saith it ? The word is nigh thee — that 

is, the ideal is nigh thee — in thy mouth and 

in thy heart ; that is, the word of faith which 



ot fifliggiong [49] 

we preach" (Rom. 10:6-8). This "word," 
or ideal of faith in itself considered, as we 
understand the apostle's thought, is such a 
thing as may be vaguely cherished in the 
human heart in an intuitional way, irrespec- 
tive of a book revelation. " The word of 
faith which we preach," is the same reality 
— the ideal cherished — receiving a clearer, 
fuller, and biblical explanation. This essen- 
tial faith, as latent, incipient, and existent in 
however slight a degree in the human soul 
is immediately and everywhere to be sought 
for by the Christian missionary. This em- 
bryonic thing — faith in an ideal however 
faint — wherever found is to be promptly en- 
couraged, explained, led out into exercise 
and fed with revealed truth, for it may be 
depended on as a sign that the essential 
Christ is brooding the soul and yearning 
with infinite solicitude to bring it to its own. 
It is with this elementary, rudimentary 
faith-principle in the soul that the mission- 
ary finds his true place of beginning with 
the pagan mind everywhere. In this he 

D 



[5°] Ube Divine IRigbt 

— — n wiii i ■■ ■ i nriM^nrTTii ii ■ ■ii wm 111 n ■ ■■miim^iwiimm 

finds the soul's moral handle which he may- 
seize, hold, and control for larger and 
higher things. 

As the nature of God, and he is one God, 

whether speaking in nature or revelation, 

Hn wbat Sense ^ as become better understood, 

<So& is we have come to see that he 
Ummanent 

is more than a being whose 

favor may be won. God always is and has 
been a being who is in the attitude of the 
initiator of the processes of grace. He is 
always beforehand with the sons of men. 
Through those distortions of God which 
the presence of sin in the soul always tends 
to create, God is made to appear not only 
wholly outside the soul, but far off from it, 
and even hostile to it. The sinner always 
conceives of God as his enemy, whose re- 
luctance to save must be overcome. Now 
this is a dreadful caricature of God, and 
entirely falsifies the situation. We are com- 
ing to see that in a deep sense God is really 
immanent in the soul, that as omnipresent he 
dwells within the sphere at least of all human 



of flntggfong [51] 

personality, in its conscience and conscious- 
ness. To be sure, in the case of the unre- 
generate, God, while existing in the sphere 
of personality, has not yet come to occupy 
the throne room of the heart, so as to form 
Christ within it. Nevertheless, God as Sa- 
viour is ever knocking at the heart's door 
to find welcome and entrance. He is infi- 
nitely eager to break through man's antago- 
nism. Like the atmosphere pressing with 
ever-persistent force many pounds to the 
square inch to enter every vacuum, so the 
God of grace presses to ascend the throne 
of man's heart to save and bless. There is a 
spiritual immanence for which the divine 
immanence as ordinarily understood by 
Prof. B. P. Bowne and others is but the pre- 
condition of the profounder experience. 1 

A real penitent never has to do God's 
work for him; to provide any propitiation 
for himself to render God willing, or to 
importune him to relax any supposed reluc- 

1 See a fine discussion of this subject in " The Diviner 
Immanence," by Francis J. McConnell. Published by 
Eaton & Mains, New York. 



[52] Zbc 2>i\nne IRigbt 

tance on his part to save. Surely God, in 
whom the atonement was eternal, who as the 
essential Christ, was before the world came 
into being, and in whom as the eternal Logos 
man's very constitution had its ground, can- 
not for a moment be truly thought of as 
waiting on man to take the initiative in his 
salvation, except as the withdrawal of man's 
sinful resistance to the gracious control of 
the soul's true Sovereign may be considered 
as initiative. Let but one step in penitence 
for sin, and in faith Godward, be taken by 
the human soul, and the God of grace, how- 
ever poorly understood intellectually, or 
theologically, will be found in the essential 
Christ, or the moral ideal trusted, waiting 
to embrace it, even as the father in the para- 
ble of the prodigal — who was really God-in- 
Christ — saw his penitent son " while he was 
yet a great way off, and ran and embraced 
him" (Luke 15 : 20), and welcomed him 
home to the heavenly forgiveness and 
bounty. Thus the spirit of Deity and the 
essential Christ have ever been one and the 



of flfflggiong [53] 

same in their gracious attitude to mankind, 

even though imperfectly known. 

This Christ, however, of whom we have 

been speaking, as " the essential Christ " as 

dimly apprehended in pre- Cbdst tbe 

Christian times, or among: ® b * ect of 

& Site IReligion 

peoples destitute of the Bible 
revelation, is the " Word," or the ideal of 
Paul's thought in the Epistle to the Romans, 
is the personal Jesus of Nazareth in the 
Gospels, is the " Word made flesh," of John, 
who " dwelt among us," and is " the efful- 
gence of the divine glory and the image of 
his substance " as described in Hebrews. 
And so historical Christianity commends 
itself as preeminently the religion of a per- 
son. In this religion Christ is the object — 
the creative author and end — of his religion 
rather than its subject as his followers are. 
This is so because as he is manifested in the 
New Testament he is a real incarnation of 
Deity; the absolute equivalent of Christ is 
God in the flesh. Christ did indeed per- 
fectly illustrate, even embody, all the prin- 



[54] Ube Divine IRiflbt 

ciples of the system he promulgated. But 
he was not the product of that religion. He 
was not himself made by the current relig- 
ions of his time, not even by Judaism, and 
that especially as some would have it, shaped 
by the religions of the older, larger East. 
He was altogether original, supernatural, 
pre-existent, self-supporting, the Christ that 
should judge the world. He came " from 
above," in a distinctive and unique sense. 
His religion always descends upon us, as 
eventually the New Jerusalem will come 
down from God out of heaven. 

The ethnic religions are of a different 
sort. They indeed have had their prophets, 
like Confucius, Gotama, Mahomet, and Zo- 
roaster. But the system of no one of these 
prophets inhered in himself in the way that 
Christ's does in him ; for with the person of 
Christ himself stands or falls every funda- 
mental doctrine of Christianity, incarnation, 
atonement, resurrection, faith, forgiveness, 
regeneration, and the final judgment of 
grace ; any one of the ethnic systems might 



of fliliggiong [55] 

have existed in its principles apart from the 
personality of its promulgator. The exact 
opposite is the case with Christianity and its 
Christ. This Christ was indeed a real his- 
toric figure, and not a magical prodigy, not 
a mere religious genius. True, he had hu- 
man limitations, but these he voluntarily as- 
sumed for us. It was a process of self- 
emptying and so of self-limitation that he 
underwent, in the interests of holy and 
saving love. In the realm of the moral and 
spiritual, Christ was always and at every 
moment king. He dominated for spiritual 
ends what we call natural law, and " broke 
the entail of sin and the Nemesis of guilt " ; 
and his absolutely original power to do this 
has been proved in the experience of mil- 
lions who have been recovered from sin's 
dominion. His becoming sin for us, and 
tasting its judgment, was throughout a vol- 
untary act, a moral achievement, such as 
was possible only to Deity in the flesh. 
Through the very cross he suffered, Christ 
catholicised his religion and universalized 



[56] Ubc Mvinc IRtgbt 

himself. As lifted up from the earth he 
draws all unto him. 

In all these respects Christ was his own 
religion, and its timeless and eternal object 
for all men. He can have no successor, for 
he himself is " the Word made flesh," " the 
same yesterday, and to-day, yea and for- 
ever " (Heb. 13 : 8). Christ therefore 
from his Virgin birth in Bethlehem to his 
atoning death on Calvary is the consummate 
expression of the divine self-activity at its 
center, challenging the world to put him to 
the test for salvation from its sins, and from 
all moral bondage. He is himself the 
gospel. 

As the divine-human personality, he is at 
once the supreme revelation of both God 
and man as personal. The world can never 
know who God is until it knows Christ. 
Nor can it know what man is until it knows 
him in Christ. Christ was the universal 
man. His characteristic designation of 
himself was "the Son of man," by which 
was meant that he was idealized man, " the 



ot flfltegions [573 

last Adam " (i Cor. 15 : 45), the new head 
of the race ; in him God and man meet and 
find each other. The Christian idea of sal- 
vation is the response by faith of the entire 
personality of man to the grace that is in 
the whole personality of Christ. Chris- 
tianity recognizes nothing as finally accom- 
plished for its disciple until the miracle 
wrought upon the personal will of the be- 
liever has secured that response, and the 
whole being is recentered in Christ to be at 
length glorified with him. 

It is through the power we have per- 
sonally to test this religion of a person by 

the response of our whole per- 

B&equate 
sonality to its overtures and Butbotit? 
. . , . in Iftelfgion 

claims, that we arrive at un- 
questionable authority in religion, and in 
the Christian religion as in no other. It is 
such an authority chiefly to him who puts it 
to actual test, as a sinner does in receiving 
redemption through Christ's atoning cross. 
This testing of Christianity receives some- 
thing more than an evidential result. 



[58] XTbe Mvtnc TRtgbt 

An evidence of Christianity is something 
which commends itself to intelligence, to 
the reason, to a school of thought. Au- 
thority deals more with the conscience, com- 
mends itself to a moral situation, to the 
possibility of actual victory over sin; so 
this authority is more than evidential. It 
appeals to the entire composite man, but es- 
pecially to the whole person as moral, as 
needing redemption from sin, and it ap- 
proves itself as a gospel of salvation even 
unto the uttermost. Authority for a human 
soul needing salvation from the sin situa- 
tion is found chiefly in the disclosure of the 
real grace, which can be experienced and 
proved in the soul's life. " One thing I 
know, that whereas I was blind now I see " 
(John 9 : 25). 

A religion thus centering in a person 
which can be experimentally tested by the 
right relation of one's whole personality to 
it, is the ideal, authoritative religion for 
universal humanity, of whatever race or 
clime. It is the fundamentally divine, the 



of missions [59] 

human, the universal religion. It is finality, 
even absoluteness itself in that realm; and 
so commends itself to all men. 

But again, Christianity is adapted to be- 
come universal in its prevalence because 
it reveals a doctrine of provi- B jp octrine 

dence, as able to tranquilize of 

provi&ence 

and bless human life, irre- 
spective of outward or material conditions. 
This doctrine is posited on the assumption 
that the soul has but one final and absolute 
need, and that is God. " Whom have I in 
heaven but thee, and there is none upon the 
earth that I desire beside thee" (Ps. 73 : 
25). By the providence of God we mean 
the assurance so emphatically given in the 
Scriptures, that all the circumstances and 
events of life are working together for good 
to the soul that is filial, that is trustful and 
submissive in its attitude toward him (Rom. 
8 : 28). This is a doctrine that cannot be 
abstractly proved, apart from Scripture 
statements, to one who doubts it. If ac- 
cepted at all, it must be at first tentatively ac- 



[6o] XTbe Mvinc IRigbt 

— — — — ^ i^i^i 

cepted upon grounds of one's general con- 
fidence in the teachings of revelation. This 
done, the hypothesis is then to be lived upon 
step by step and day by day in the school of 
life. As this is done ever increasing tran- 
quility of life follows, and the evidence of 
the wisdom of thus living begins to grow, 
till finally no event, however distressing, 
will shake one's confidence that " under- 
neath are the everlasting arms." With Job 
one can say, " yea, though he slay me, yet 
will I trust him" (Job 13 : 15). One will 
choose with Moses, " rather to suffer afflic- 
tion with the people of God than to enjoy 
the pleasures of sin for a season" (Heb. 
11 : 25 ) . With Paul one will say, " For 
our light affliction which is but for a mo- 
ment worketh for us a far more exceeding 
and eternal weight of glory; while we look 
— mark this qualification — not at the things 
which are seen, but at the things which are 
not seen " (2 Cor. 4 : 17, 18). 

One of the richest spiritual biographies 
known to the writer is that of Madam Baron- 



of missions [61] 

ess Bunsen. Her life was lived for many- 
years in association with her distinguished 
husband in the foremost court society of 
Rome, London, and in various German 
cities. Her home was the resort of states- 
men, historians, scholars, and artists, em- 
bracing also eminent Christian personages 
of her time. 

That which makes this biography so in- 
valuable from a Christian point of view, 
is that throughout the very remarkable 
correspondence that fills the volume, car- 
ried on with the great variety of charac- 
ters in different spheres of life, as well as 
with her own children, Madam Bunsen's 
sentiment abounds with clear, sane, and 
biblical expositions of the divine care under 
which all life is lived which is filial toward 
God. In one of her letters to her mother 
while yet a young Christian, this remarkable 
woman wrote : " I have begun the new year 
with a degree of cheerfulness of spirit which 
I would not by any consideration contrive 
to lessen, wherefore I have allowed myself 



[62] Ube Mvinc Kigbt 

to enjoy unrestrained a feeling which I am 
thankful to say grows upon me every year, 
of confidence, not in the prosperity of life, 
but in the power of going through with 
God's assistance whatever life may bring: 
going through not as a beast of burden 
groaning under the weight imposed, but as 
a joyful bearer of the ark of the sanctuary. 
Human strength alone is as insufficient to 
support the weight of a feather as of a 
mountain, but with that aid which is ever 
granted to them that ask, the mountain will 
not be more oppressive than the feather." 

To a friend who doubted if he could en- 
dure the difficulties of his position, she 
wrote, " Screw your courage to the sticking 
place, and let life bring what it will; say 
to yourself : ' It shall not get the better of 
me.' To be brought into a contingency de- 
pended not upon yourself; to get out of a 
contingency depends not, or may not de- 
pend, upon yourself; but to be master of 
the crisis and stand upright before it — that 
is your part. 



of Emissions [63] 

Breast the wave, Christian, where it is strongest; 
Look for day, Christian, when night is longest." 

This reality of providence is as available 
for the most poverty-stricken pariah of 
India, as it is for the most favored of civil- 
ized peoples. As this is a potential value, 
however, all need to be brought to realize 
that they must co-operate with the truth of 
providence if they are to gain the blessing 
provided in it. 

This doctrine of providence is grounded 
in two things; first, in the nature of the 
divine love which ever outreaches to im- 
part to man God's own type of blessedness 
in the human life's unfolding; and second, 
in the fact that he who is en rapport with 
such a God, need expect nothing inhar- 
monious with his highest and ultimate wel- 
fare to occur to him. No other system than 
Christianity has such a doctrine; it cannot 
have, because no other system has such a 
conception of Deity, nor such a concep- 
tion of possible harmony with the Deity. 

Doubtless, such a doctrine, even by most 



[64] ZTbe Mvinc TRfgbt 

Christians, is but feebly believed; and 
human nature often rebelliously resists it 
in its practical bearings — resists it from 
sheer wilfulness and pride. Probably more 
unrest and mental misery arise from dis- 
trust of and anger against God concerning 
untoward events in life than from any other 
single cause. There is a strain against the 
Infinite. And yet this Christian doctrine is 
an elementary thing in the system of Chris- 
tian truth. It is not fatalism. Christianity 
puts no embargo on one's bettering his con- 
ditions, if he justly can; " it encourages to 
this." Whenever, however, the circum- 
stances of life or its sorrows impose limita- 
tions or afflictions beyond man's power to 
avert or remove, they are to be regarded as 
divinely permitted at least, if not imposed, 
for divine though mysterious reasons; and 
when trustfully submitted to, from that mo- 
ment they become providential in their 
moral bearings, their graciousness of pur- 
pose, and have an entirely changed signifi- 
cance and value. God may not ordain the 



of flfliggfong [65] 

event in itself which occasions trial, e. g., 
the sale of Joseph into Egypt; but he 
does ordain the moral bearings of even 
such an event in itself sinful, upon those 
who are disciplined thereby, and thus over- 
rules the evil (Gen. 50 : 20). There is of 
course a sovereign element in the appoint- 
ment of human conditions which our phi- 
losophy cannot sound, but which we must 
take on trust. The Christian thing to do 
when events are plainly beyond one's power 
of control or understanding is devoutly to 
accept them, however trying and however 
mysterious, and seek for their moral les- 
sons. That faith is yet in the infantine 
stage which has not realized that the rich- 
est blessing in the grace of Christ comes 
through the school of trial. The teachings 
of Jesus, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epis- 
tles, and indeed the whole Bible is shot 
through and through with this teaching as 
to providence. The exact form of outward 
circumstance in itself considered then, 
would seem to have little or nothing to do 

E 



166] zbe S)t\>ine IRfabt 

with the measure of the real values in life. 
The apostle was able to say, " I have learned 
in whatsoever state I am, therein to be con- 
tent " (Phil. 4 : n). The reason of this 
deep confidence was that through the very 
pressure of the events of life, and under the 
guidance of that Spirit, who is also imma- 
nent within the wheels of all circumstance, 
Paul knew he was finding his way into 
God's eternal plan for him. He knew that 
the divine ordainment was behind him and 
that things must work for good. 

He fixed thee 'mid this dance 

Of plastic circumstance, 

This present, thou forsooth, would'st fain 

arrest ; 
Machinery just meant 
To give thy soul its bent, 
Try thee, and turn thee forth sufficiently 

impressed. 
Look not thou down but up; 
To uses of a cup, 

The festal board lamps flash and trumpets peal, 
The new wine's foaming flow, 
The Master's lips aglow: 
Thou heaven's consummate cup,. 
What needest thou with earth's wheel? 



of flftiggtons [67] 

Every man's life in its last analysis is a 
plan of God. 1 By him the end is seen from 
the beginning. Every disap- Evcrs man , g 
pointment is his appointment : %lfc a 

rr jplan of ©o& 

every sorrow is provided for, 
every hair of one's head numbered, and 
every tear put into God's bottle. For every 
deprivation and bereavement rightly re- 
ceived, there is provided a compensation in 
the grace of God, so that when life's course 
shall have been run, it will appear that " the 
sufferings of this present time are not 
worthy to be compared with the glory that 
shall be revealed in us " (Rom. 8 : 18). 

How adapted then is Christianity wher- 
ever it finds human life and under whatso- 
ever conditions, to commend itself to all, for 
it has assurance that its grace covers all the 
exigencies and extremities of life. It under- 
takes not only to justify the soul from its 
sins, but also to redeem and uplift the whole 
life course; to guide it into a career, and 



1 See Bushnell's great sermon on " I girded thee 
(Cyrus), though thou hast not known me" (Isa. 45 : 5). 



[68] ube SHvtne Kiflbt 

on to a divine goal. The veteran missionary 
Dr. Hiram Bingham, now of Honolulu, but 
who has spent a half-century in missionary 
service in the Gilbert Islands, once wrote of 
his isolation in those islands, " I have at 
times been so cut off from the home land 
that at times letters reached me only after 
intervals of eighteen months. I have been 
much alone, but never lonely." So deep was 
his abiding assurance of the divine presence 
with him. Surely then, if the human soul 
anywhere, in any land, would find a religion 
which promises to take account of the hard 
and painful externals in its life and lot, and 
will turn them all into present and eternal 
well-being, where can it so well find it as in 
Christianity ? 

Nor has the Christian missionary found 
his whole message until he is prepared to 
teach all suffering souls whom he touches, 
this corollary of his gospel of grace; that 
on the grounds of the gospel he brings, each 
one may be certainly blessed by accepting 
his lot in life however circumstanced, as 



of fmiggtons [69] 

after all enswathed in the divine love, care, 
and purpose. The very woes that afflict him 
are intended to be for him the very gentlest 
treatment which on the whole God himself 
can use, in order to work out for him the 
highest good. 

A valuable, recently published book is 
"The Altar Fire," by Arthur Christopher 
Benson, son of the archbishop of Canter- 
bury, and one of the editors of the " Letters 
of the late Queen Victoria." This book pur- 
ports to be the diary of a person who started 
in life with fortune, gained fame as an au- 
thor, was enjoying life with his charming 
family, but to whom all sorts of disasters 
afterward came. He lost his power to 
write books, was bereft of his family and, 
fortune, suffered nervous exhaustion, hypo- 
chondria, and yet finally emerged into a 
spiritual tranquillity which was entirely in- 
dependent of all the conditions which pre- 
viously had seemed so essential to him. He 
simply learned through the school of trial 
to put himself humbly and confidently in 



[7°] Ube Wivine TRtflbt 

the hands of the God who made him. He 
reasoned, " I cannot amend myself, but I 
can at least co-operate with God's loving 
will. I can stumble onward with my hand 
in his, like a timid child with a strong and 
loving father. I may wish to be lifted in 
his arms. I may wonder why he does not 
have more pity on my frailty, but can be- 
lieve that he is leading me home, and that 
his way is best and nearest." 

One of the strange evidences of the truth 
of providence, is the fact that those very 
Christians in whom is found the strongest 
faith in the doctrine, are those who have 
suffered most in the school of life. Indeed, 
only such can prove the doctrine in its 
deepest worth. 

Another element in Christianity which 
adapts it to become the universal world 

Biimattbe religion ^ its ultimate aim. 

©o&Ufce fn That aim is to create the god- 
Cbaracter 

like in personal character. 

The confidence that such a goal may be 

reached is grounded in the fact that the 



of missions [71] 

work of Christ set forth in the Scriptures 
on its subjective side is to form Christ him- 
self within the soul as " the hope of glory." 
This hope of glory becomes such a hope 
because through conformation to the Christ 
within the spirit, the outcome of God's 
method of recentering the soul within him- 
self, the soul becomes possessed of a God- 
consciousness, which itself is glory begun 
below. Man was created to become a son 
of God, actually so, as potentially every 
man, despite the fall, is still such a son by 
virtue of his creation. The glorified Christ 
as the second Adam, the firstborn of many 
brethren, is the norm of his sonship. By 
regeneration sons and daughters are di- 
vinely begotten into Christ's moral image; 
and so there results a new and higher race 
— the new-Adamic race — greater and fuller 
than the first Adamic, by as much as the 
second creative work is higher than the first. 
In this our mortal sphere, a disciplinary 
stage of being, " it is not yet made manifest 
what we shall be. We know that if we shall 



[72] Ube Divine IRiflbt 

be manifested, we shall be like Him — have 
our epiphany— for we shall see him even as 
he is" (i John 3:2). Our new corpo- 
reality will resemble his own at the right 
hand of God. We shall be glorified in body, 
soul, and spirit. We shall be godlike in 
character, and godlike also in the exercise 
of powers and functions of which we now 
have little conception. 

Thus our salvation is no artificial thing. 
While it begins objectively through the at- 
tachment of our faith to God manifest in the 
flesh, and dying and living again for us in 
a vicarious way, so that our confidence is 
reawakened to trust and hope in him; yet 
when the process is complete, we shall find 
ourselves personally transformed into his 
real moral likeness, so that our character 
itself will stand forth a finished new created 
product, a character godlike. The soul will 
then have a new spontaneity of righteous- 
ness which will loathe sin forever. By ex- 
ercise in this new freedom the soul even 
here progressively by second nature becomes 



of Emissions [73] 

godlike. This will at last be a righteous- 
ness as voluntary as Christ's own, such as 
in the fulness of the divine loyalty he ex- 
pressed in the exclamation, " I delight to do 
thy will, O my God " (Ps. 40 : 8). 

What system of religion holds out a hope 
like this for sinful man? Other systems 
than Christ's speak of some Nirvana, little 
else than non-existence, a moral negation at 
the best, or of purgatorial cleansings, filled 
with pain and torment, or of endless trans- 
migrations extended through long eons of 
agonized probations, wherein man may 
doubtfully hope to emerge into ultimate but 
vague felicity. It is left for the religion of 
Christ alone to negative all these heartless, 
abortive, despairing destinies, and to offer 
us in lieu thereof a hope as certain and 
natural to us as Christ's own in which we 
are his joint heirs. 

But granting that the Christianity of 
which we have been speaking is adapted to 
be the absolute world religion, may it be 
legitimately and everywhere propagated? 



[74] Ube Divine TRigbt 

This matter of propagating Christianity is 
attended with doubts in some minds. This 
propagation implies a relation to other re- 
ligions more or less subversive of their very- 
existence, at least in their present forms. 
Hence many are questioning the right of 
Christianity to place itself with aggressive 
activity in relations which disparage at least 
those ancient systems. With this question 
I shall deal in the second part of this dis- 
cussion, to which I now pass. 



part 11 

Ube IRiGfct of tbe Gburcb to 
propagate tbis IReiiaion 

1 WAS lately asked in a symposium on mis- 
sions to answer the question : " Has Chris- 
Caugeg tianity the moral right to sup- 

<* tbe plant the ethnic faiths ? " The 
Questioning 

influences which give rise to 

such a query, often in the public mind, are 

mainly two: the conception of missions 



of flfliggiong [ts] 

represented by questionable forms of mis- 
sionary zealotry, and prevalent thought-ten- 
dencies in comparative religion. Of all re- 
ligions Christianity undoubtedly is the most 
missionary. Its aggressiveness proves dis- 
turbing. The right of Christianity to en- 
croach upon other systems is doubted. In 
viewing the contest speculatively, ere men 
are aware, sympathy is engendered for one 
type of these faiths as against another. A 
spirit of championship then springs up, 
zeal for partisan victory obscures the im- 
portance of the truth at stake, and the issue 
is likely to be viewed as if it were a game, 
to be lost or won on the field of athletics. 
If the question were, " Has any form of re- 
ligion a moral right to play at religion as a 
game ? " we answer, " No ! " The real issue 
involved is vastly deeper and more seri- 
ous. There is something more than a tour- 
nament on. ■ 

The fact that the question of the legiti- 
macy of missions prevails in many minds is 
sufficient reason why it should be squarely 



[76] ftbe Wlvine IRtgbt 

faced and met. The answer to it profoundly 
affects, not only Christian missions, but 
moral effort of every kind. 

It is important at the outset to establish 
an understanding of terms. To attempt to 
answer the question propounded in its pres- 
ent form would be to increase a confusion 
already existing. From the query as above 
stated, it is necessary to eliminate at least 
three grave assumptions: 

i. That the ethnic faiths as they now ex- 
ist as really as the Christian, although in a 

less degree, are of divine 
flUfsIeaMna . . 

assumptions origin. 

2. That Christian mission- 
ary effort is intrinsically the assertion of a 
right — a right asserted as against other 
natural rights. 

3. That true missionary effort, by first in- 
tention at least, seeks to supplant that which 
is really defensible. 

When these erroneous presuppositions are 
disposed of, and the case is stated as its na- 
ture requires, we shall have gone far toward 



of Emissions [77] 

simplifying the answer to the question be- 
fore us. 

As to the first element of misconception, 
it is implied that the ethnic faiths have an 
equal standing with Chris- 
tianity in the court of com- Wot CosorMnatc 
parative religion; and, if so, cb ™f n(t ^ 
that they have such standing 
because of their inherent meritorious quali- 
ties — such qualities as meet the real needs of 
the people now holding them. But this in- 
ference is due to a priori considerations and 
begs the question involved. Such an infer- 
ence concretely expressed means to say, for 
example, that Christianity and Hinduism 
equally arose out of purely natural antece- 
dent causes ; that in the nature of the case, 
Hinduism is as perfectly adapted to meet the 
needs of Hindus as Christianity is to meet 
the needs of Anglo-Saxons ; that God is as 
really the author of one set of adaptations 
as of the other ; that there is nothing more 
supernatural in Christianity than in Hindu- 
ism ; and that therefore the attempt of Occi- 



[78] tbe S)tx>tne Tftiabt 

dentals to enter Asia and to readjust Hindu 
conditions to Christian ideals is an imperti- 
nence and intrusion. Theirs for them are as 
good as ours for us. Any such plea en- 
tered for the non-Christian religions grows 
out of hidden premises — premises that are 
assumed, but are really the very things that 
need to be proved. Such plea, so common 
in our day, is a deduction of the so-called 
" historical method," just now so much in 
vogue. It is a corollary of the doctrine of 
evolution extremely viewed. But a just 
view of the evolutionary principle warrants 
no such corollary, and the deduction is an 
abuse of the historical method, however 
legitimate that method is within certain 
limits. 

In the view of its champions, the " histor- 
ical method " is thought to be the one great 

Hbuse of tbe anc * decisive medium of knowl- 

iHistorfcai edge ; whereas there are other 
flletboo & 

methods of vastly more worth. 

One has spoken of this method substantially 

as follows : 



ot missions [79] 

It assumes to determine what is by what has 
been; it elucidates the law of man's moral nature 
by the principles which are supposed to have 
governed the anthropoid ape : the authority of the 
Bible by going back to the ghost-and-spirit wor- 
ship which are supposed to be its real genesis. 
The nature and value of each present fact is de- 
termined by its supposed historic origin and de- 
velopment. But we may reverse the process; in- 
terpret the monkey by the man; get light on the 
value of the Hebrew revelation by its solution of 
our present problems; . . . look for the Maker's 
mark not only in the fire-mist, but in the structure 
of the moral organism. . . It is often a matter of 
great advantage not to have to wait for the 
" historic method " to be perfected and corrected ; 
for example, when a man has an attack of ap- 
pendicitis, the knowledge of the vermiform ap- 
pendix as it now is, yields a far more valuable 
contribution to the solution of his case than the 
entire history of that organ. 1 

And especially, we would add, when the his- 
tory in question is most hypothetical. 

Now, respecting the origin of the ethnic 
religions, it must at the least be said that 
they cannot be accounted for by a single, 
uniform, upward evolution ; their genesis is 

1 John Henry Denison, in an article in the " Atlantic 
Monthly" for June, 1906, entitled, "The White Death 
of the Soul." 



[8o] Ube 3>ix>tne TRfgbt 

composite. Even though some or all of 
them started with elements of truth, they 
now represent dreadful deteriorations and 
corruptions of an earlier purity. Doubtless, 
underlying all these religions there are some 
elements of natural, and hence of true, re- 
ligion: certain intuitions, suggestions of 
conscience, and hints of nature conveying 
much needful knowledge of God. " These 
not having the law (revelation) are a law 
(revelation) unto themselves." 

This form of light is the common prop- 
erty of all men with or without a book 
revelation; and it emanates 

H ©ospei from Christ, the eternal Log- 
of Slature ' & 

mntecet>ent os. Moreover, this form of 
to all 
•fteiigtous Cults light affords even an elemen- 
tary gospel, as Paul in Rom. 
2 : 4-10 clearly intimates, however poorly 
apprehended or appropriated that gospel is. 
If men had given credence to such early 
gospel hints as were afforded by Abel's altar 
or by their own deeper intuitions; if they 
had so believed as to act on their best 



Of flMggtOng [Si] 

belief — for such and such only is faith — they 
would have been saved in some infantine 
degree, and the systems of religion repre- 
sented by them would have been purer. 
Among antediluvians, for example, Noah 
had, as Dr. William Ashmore has said, " no 
monopoly of gopher wood." There was a 
monopoly in unbelief, except as Noah and 
his family were the shining exceptions to it. 
Doubtless, had others than Noah gone to 
boat-building, showing faith in God's pro- 
vision to save, they would have been pre- 
served with Noah. 

But no truly historic account of the ethnic 
religions can be just that does not take note 

of the persistent tendencies of 

, . . , JEtbnic Jfaftbs 

sin to pervert man s original perversions 

stock of truth. Sin has dis- of tb ^7 itive 
torted the elements of primi- 
tive religion with which the ethnic faiths 
started; it has falsified normal conceptions 
of both God and man. Sin is God-accusing 
as well as self-justifying; it projects its own 
perverseness upon God. " I knew thee that 



[82] ZEbe g)tv>ine TRiflbt 

thou art an hard man," said the man in the 
parable (Matt. 25 : 24, A. V.). He really 
knew nothing of the kind. He himself was 
the " hard man/" who should have discerned 
a truer aspect of the divine character. The 
God of this man's evil imagination was a 
fiction. Sin has thus been a fruitful means 
of introducing into all the ethnic religions 
fearful perversions, gross deteriorations of 
an earlier truth. 

Then official and ecclesiastical traditional- 
ism and self-interest have left their marks 
upon the ethnic religions. This has been 
true in Judaism, and even in Christianity. 
Because of the mischievous effects of priest- 
craft and clericalism, Israel lost her nation- 
ality and Christianity early fell from her 
apostolic estate, and has but slowly re- 
covered. Surely the ethnic faiths have not 
been exempt from similar and as degrading 
processes of deterioration. 

If the principle of evolution as a factor 
has played a part in the development of re- 
ligious systems and activities, retrogression 



of fmiggtong [S3] 

and degeneracy have played their mischiev- 
ous part also. " Broken lights " of the true 
" Sun of Righteousness " which once existed 
have been put out. They have been extin- 
guished by the people's grossness. Through 
Brahmin priest, Taoist conjurer, Moham- 
medan dervish, and African witch-doctor, 
that " Light which lighteth every man as he 
cometh into the world," has been turned into 
darkness, because as abnormal religionists 
they have cast a shadow on the sun. Said 
Christ : " All that ever came before me are 
thieves and robbers." That which was 
man's original heritage in the eternal world 
— the essential Christ — has been stolen 
away, rendering it more difficult for the re- 
deeming God to do his intended work. 

Satanic influence also has entered in to 
debase the ethnic faiths. The long history of 
man is in line with the biblical account of an 
irrepressible and tragic conflict between the 
" seed of the woman," the Son of man, the 
last Adam, and the old serpent, the devil. 
It is therefore impossible for us to blind our 



p4] XTbe mvinc TRtgbt 

eyes to the corrupting influence of diabolic 
agency upon the primeval order. 

A day spent in Benares, Canton, or Kyoto 
amid the temples of idolatry and shame and 
witchcraft will convince any candid observer 
that the same Satanic influence which in 
Bible times animated Jannes and Jambres, 
Elymas, Simon Magus, and the Sons of 
Sceva, in modern pagan life also often 
makes religionists drunk with its sorceries. 
Let one who doubts read a work by the late 
Dr. John L. Nevius, a foremost Presby- 
terian missionary in China, on the demon- 
ology of that land. The national symbol of 
China is a dragon. Chinese Taoism, which 
once represented a sort of Logos doctrine, 
has so deteriorated as to be little else but the 
expression of demonism. 

A second implication of the question pro- 
pounded is that Christian missions in them- 
selves are intrinsically the assertion of a 
right, as against other natural rights. To 
conceive of such missionary effort as springs 
from the mind of Christ as the assertion of 



of mifggfong [85] 

a mere right is to put such effort on too low 
a plane altogether. 

But Christian missions are not concerned 
to defend themselves as merely legitimate; 
they are more than that ; they cbrfstfan 
are an outreach of grace in ^^n 
behalf of others; efforts to legitimate 
save men unto God and unto themselves, 
and not to mere Western sectarianism. Said 
Paul as he came to the Romans, through 
storm and shipwreck and imprisonment : 
" For I long to see you that I may impart 
unto you some spiritual gift." Christianity 
is not competitive; it never exults over 
another system because it is a rival, nor 
seeks a victory for victory's sake. It rather 
yearns over the inadequate system to make 
good all it fails to do ; it reaches beyond the 
devotee to the personality of the divine ideal 
of Christ's purchase to render it godlike in 
being and destiny. 

In an address given by ex-Secretary Fos- 
ter in Carnegie Music Hall, New York — an 
address widely repeated on the secretary's 



p6] ttbe Btvfne TRtgbt 

return from a round-the-world tour a few 
years since, he substantially said that if he 
were asked by what right Christian America 
had gone out into the various lands of Asia 
to disturb and reconstruct systems and in- 
stitutions in those lands known as heathen, 
his reply would be : " The right to commu- 
nicate to others benefits too good to keep." 
The answer cannot be gainsaid. The legiti- 
macy of foreign missions as the profoundest 
agency in the ongoing civilization of the 
world, is beyond all question, if it is not pros- 
ecuted as a partisan crusade of one re- 
ligious system as against another, but rather 
as such a renewing and constructive potency 
as seeks to bring blessing to all the world. 
Christianity has in it elements of such trans- 
cendent value as are adapted to every one 
on earth. And so the conclusion is irresisti- 
ble, that by the same intelligence and will 
that brought them into being, they are in- 
tended for every one on earth. He who dis- 
cerns this adaptation himself must share in 
executing the intention, or become guiltier 



ot missions [87] 

than before for the estate of his brother- 
man. 

Then as to the third assumption: True 
Christian missions do not attempt to sup- 
plant what in an ethnic faith 

missions 

is in itself good and true. In Displace ttotbina 

UKUottbs 
Confucianism, for example, it 

discerns between the true and the false, or 
the inadequate, and seeks not, by any first 
intention at least, to destroy the inadequate. 
So far as there are in all men elements of 
natural religion, true in themselves, there is 
no occasion to displace them. Such residue 
of natural religion, wherever found, is to be 
complemented, fulfilled by " the true light 
which now shineth." Christianity in its 
normal exercise acts on the baser elements 
of other systems as quicksilver acts on pul- 
verized gold-bearing quartz; it gathers up 
the particles of precious metal hidden in the 
coarser element. In this process the rock 
is discarded, but there is no contempt of any 
real worth. As the quicksilver fulfils the 
quartz for bullion or coin-current, so Chris- 



[Ml Ube mvinc TRIabt 

tianity brings to its own the truth latent in 
the ethnic systems. 

Now, with these unfortunate confusions 
eliminated, the question remaining to be an- 
swered is a very different one from that 
propounded to us, and so perplexing to 
many minds. The real issue amounts to 
this : Is Christianity warranted in imparting 
its divine grace to all mankind, and thus 
realizing to them the values hinted or in- 
cipient in other religions, even though the 
process. in the end will discard the base and 
harmful elements incumbering them ? There 
can be but one answer to such a question — 
an emphatic, " Yea, verily." 

The Christianity of the New Testament is 
in no conflict with the soul in any land or 
time who in his light has acted penitently 
and believingly toward his highest ideal. 
That in principle is faith, whether exercised 
by an Abraham, a Plato, or a Spurgeon, by 
an Enoch, a Socrates, or a George Miiller. 
So far then as among religionists of any 
cult, the faith-principle has existed — doubt- 



of fiaiggiong [89] 

less, it often exists despite the cult — God has 
gracious regard for it, as ethnic religions 
rarely have, for they have no such grace as 
Christianity has to offer. 

In so far, indeed, as missionary effort has 
been prosecuted as a crusade of one re- 
ligious system against another with a view 
to some selfish partisan advantage, un- 
doubtedly such form of mission work has 
been open to grave objection. Wherever in 
any human being or society any inherent, 
natural right exists, Christ respects that 
right. It is a thing really implanted by him- 
self; he has therefore no occasion to an- 
tagonize it; he would rather conserve and 
nourish it. If sad abuses have often marred 
religious effort, this is because of weakness 
in the agent, and not because the extension 
of truth in itself is evil. When, for exam- 
ple, Francis Xavier went to the East and, 
not content to share his spiritual grace with 
his fellow-men, proceeded to assert the 
claim of his imperial master at Rome to 
temporal power in Japan, he violated actual 



[9q] TEbe 2>l\>ine IRigbt 

human rights in the interest of fictitious 
claims of a usurping master ; it naturally re- 
sulted that the first proselytes were turned 
upon and slain by thousands, and Chris- 
tianity was interdicted in Japan for three 
hundred years. 

In 1899, under severe pressure from 
France, an imperial decree was secured 
from the Chinese government conferring on 
Roman Catholic dignitaries a recognized of- 
ficial status in China. Accordingly, French 
bishops adopted the rank of Chinese govern- 
ors, traveled in an official chair with bearers 
appropriate to that rank, with attendants 
and outriders, and had a cannon discharged 
upon their arrival and departure. When 
this same status was offered to Protestant 
missionaries it was promptly declined. Thus 
they avoided blaspheming the whole princi- 
ple of rights and committing missionary 
suicide. Mr. A. R. Colquhon once wrote: 
" The blood of the martyrs is in China the 
seed of French aggrandizement." 

In 1900 Germany, though Protestant, 



of amissions [9p 

seized the district of Kiao Chao in China as 
an indemnity for the slaughter of two Ger- 
man priests, and precipitated the Boxer 
uprising. Is it any wonder that men ask: 
" What sort of missions is this ? " 

In estimating this question of rights, there 
is danger that we may attribute to them a 
false reality. A custom is not ffal8C 
necessarily the expression of a "notions of 
natural right, nor is it a true 
evolution simply because it is ancient or in- 
digenous to a people. There is a difference 
even in pagan lands between real and ficti- 
tious rights. Would any man in his senses 
claim that the horrors of Hindu widowhood, 
or the nameless immoralities of Hindu tem- 
ples, or the abominations of the caste system, 
as described by Amy Wilson-Carmichael in 
her book, " Things as They Are," or the sys- 
tem of plurality of wives in Mohammedan- 
ism, or the sodden polyandry of Tibet, rep- 
resent any human rights before God or men ? 
Are these the product of any true evolution ? 
That there are justifiable ways and means 



M TEbe 2)iv>ine IRtQbt 

whereby good men may seek to remedy 
these abuses is beyond question. 

Respecting any true element in the re- 
ligion of a pagan the real missionary will 
say, as did Paul at Athens : " What there- 
fore ye worship in ignorance this I set forth 
unto you." This element need never be 
antagonized or minimized ; it rather is to be 
used and built upon. It is because of the 
existence of this element at the basis of 
every man's moral nature that Christianity 
can make a beginning anywhere, at any 
moment, with any human soul, under what- 
ever system of religion it exists. For exam- 
ple, if in a heathen temple of China or India 
I behold some poor devotee in sorrow, 
groaning out a prayer to an idol, I need not 
check that cry; it represents just what I do 
when in some dire extremity I pour out my 
anguish to an invisible sympathy. What I 
need to do is to know the language of this 
worshiper; to gain his confidence; so to 
get into sympathy with him that I can show 
him his error; to present to him the great 



of flqtggtong [93] 

divine reality, which the image indeed sug- 
gests, while it yet obscures the God for 
whom he gropes. My mission to that man 
is to correct and fulfil his prayer. 

Of course, in so doing, elements in this 
man's religion will be eliminated — yes, even 

supplanted: but in how dif- 

©fsplacemcnt 

ferent a sense from that con- •fftot 

, , , Diolence 

templated by a mere conten- 
tious attack! This better kind of displace- 
ment is a wholly legitimate thing — nay, 
a necessary thing — if health, instead of 
disease is to prevail. Does displacement in 
this sense do violence to anything sacred? 
True, on the one hand there is an elimina- 
tion of error; but on the other there is 
a fulfilment of truth. Every introduction 
of pure food into the body expels from the 
circulation baser elements, while it nourishes 
the vital principle. Then why should he 
who is the Bread of Life be denied to the 
spiritually moribund, even though it is 
certain, in the progress of the new spiritual 
health, that dead matter will be thrown off ? 



[94] Zbc Mvinc TRlQbt 

Such changes as those indicated make possi- 
ble the ascending order — the true evolution 
in God's universe. 

But we should be dealing superficially 
with the real issues in this discussion if we 
did not point out the unique fact that Chris- 
tianity is more than a school of competitive 
thought, in the sense that the ethnic faiths 
are such — something which people are called 
upon to believe, merely intellectually believe. 
Christianity is Christ; and he is more than 
a school of philosophy, a set of opinions. 
Christ is the essential reality — the Eternal 
Word, or Reason — at the heart of the uni- 
verse. He can be experienced and known 
in every personal soul, irrespective of race 
distinction. The world and all things there- 
in were created through Christ — on account 
of Christ, according to Christ ; and they are 
potentially redeemed to him also. Hence 
the secrets of life and the world can be in- 
terpreted to and understood by those only 
who are in him. Moreover, Christ as such 
a reality can be experienced only as some- 



of amissions [95] 

■ !■ Mill — —Ml I IH 1I ■II— IIMBII1 — ■!■■!■ I ll 1 1 I ll ll I I ! ■■■■■■"— ^——— 

thing deeper than theoretic beliefs is 
grasped; only as the whole soul is sur- 
rendered to him — intellect, heart, conscience, 
and will. When man is thus given up to 
Christ in a vital way, by the divine Spirit, 
Christ authenticates himself to the human 
spirit in a wondrous way. He thus ap- 
proves himself as the final need of man as 
man. Accordingly he can indwell man, in 
consonance with any racial peculiarity. 
Mozoomdar complained that the Christ who 
had been introduced to India by Western 
missionaries was an Englishman or a Yan- 
kee, whereas he was an Oriental Christ, and 
more apprehensible by him on that account. 1 
Dr. Charles Cuthbert Hall in his late sec- 
ond course of lectures in the East empha- 
sized certain adaptations of the Oriental 
mind to the experience of Christ — a matter 
which probably needs to be more regarded 
in wise missionary endeavor. Although I 
should be compelled to stop far short . of 



1 For such an apprehension, see introduction to Mo- 
zoomdar's " The Oriental Christ." 



[96] Ube Mvine TRtgbt 

Doctor Hall in his estimate of the character- 
istic expressions of that mind. 

But we do this matter of the extension of 

Christianity scant justice if we pause with 

b Deep its defense only and merely 

imperative justify its rights. There is a 
in flMsBions J J & 

deep imperative in it. What 

is this movement of foreign missions ? In its 
simplest form, it is putting down a high type 
of man alongside a lower one : the planting 
of such a man as Moffat among the Bechu- 
anas of South Africa, or Paton among the 
cannibals of the New Hebrides, or Griffith 
John among the Chinese. Such a personal- 
ity is a reconstructive force and placed 
where he is needed. He translates and un- 
folds the Christian Scriptures to men whose 
light hitherto has been but as starlight to 
sunlight; he unveils hitherto hidden rela- 
tions between the redeeming God and his 
creatures, who need more than all else to 
know him, his person, his character, his 
grace ; he puts the languages of rude tribes 
into writing — one hundred such languages 



of Missions [97] 

within a century — and creates new litera- 
tures ; he brings back the shattered polyglot 
tribes of men to a better Shinar than that 
which once witnessed the confusions of 
Babel. The missionary puts into the hands 
of men schools, hospitals, and industries. 
He affords sane treatment to disease, relief 
to the opium vice, and works a gradual cure 
of the " open sore of the world." He abates 
the evils of Hindu widowhood, gathers 
thousands of children into orphanages, and 
unbinds the crippled feet of numberless in- 
nocents. All this is more than proselytism, 
mere sect-making. 

Should any think that the work of mis- 
sions is an arbitrary forcing of issues upon 
the peoples of heathendom, let 
him hear Mr. Chester Hoi- testimonies 
combe, for twenty years con- 
nected with the diplomatic staff of the 
United States in China. In a recent article 
on the missionary enterprise he thus writes : 

To talk to persons who choose to listen; to 
throw open wide the doors of chapels where 
G 



[98] XTbe mvinc TRfgbt 

natives who desire may hear the Christian faith 
explained and urged upon their attention; to sell 
at half-cost or to give the Bible and Christian 
literature freely to those who may care to read; 
to heal the sick without cost; to instruct children 
whose parents are desirous that they should re- 
ceive education — surely none of these constitute 
methods or practices to which the word " force " 
may be applied, under any allowable use of the 
English language. . . There is no difference be- 
tween the work of pioneer preachers in the far 
West, that of " settlement workers " in the slums 
of great cities, or of eloquent pastors of wealthy 
and fashionable churches in the Back Bay district 
of Boston, or Fifth Avenue in New York, and 
that done by missionaries in China. . . The work 
is absolutely identical in character and method, 
differentiated from the others only by simple 
forms of presentation in order to reach the more 
effectively minds wholly unfamiliar with the truths 
presented. 

Even as I write, this paragraph of a letter 
sent from twenty native Christians in the in- 
terior of Africa is before me : 

We are those who went astray, but the Lord 
did not leave us. He sought us with perseverance, 
and we heard his call and answered. Now we 
are his slaves. We had three teachers. One is in 
Europe; another has gone to Ikau; and this one 
who stays with us shortly goes to rest in Europe. 



ot missions [99] 

With whom shall we be left? It is good that 
you should send us teachers who cause us to be 
full of the words of the Father. We have a 
desire to hear your teachings of Jehovah God; 
and we have a desire to see you in the eyes, but 
we have not the opportunity; we shall have it in 
heaven. 

Does this sound as if missionary effort had 
wrought any wrong to this people so re- 
cently out of f etichism and cannibalism ? 

If we to-day have no right to plant in 
India, China, and Africa the seeds of in- 
tellectual and moral renewal, then our an- 
cestors, who were pagans in the forests of 
North Germany, about the lagoons of Hol- 
land, and on the moors of Britain, were in 
egregious error when they set in operation 
the forces which translated and printed the 
Bible, founded the universities, promulgated 
the Magna Charta, brought on the Reforma- 
tion, and induced the successive migrations 
from Europe whereby the New World was 
discovered, peopled, and refashioned into 
the great, free republic that it is. 

The truth is, the Christ of the universe 

l.fFC, 



[ioq] Qbc Divine IRtgbt 

cannot be himself and fail to do what is in- 
volved in his gracious incarnation ; nor can 
his people be themselves as indwelt by him 
and not extend this incarnation and reenact 
his gracious deeds. To deny the legitimacy 
of Christian missions is to deny the right of 
holy and gracious sovereignty in God, the 
right to incarnate himself among men, and 
is to invalidate the legitimacy of all best 
things in life and history; and that is to 
legitimize their opposites — to assert the 
rights of sin and deify its prince. 

The final question then, is not whether 

the Christian church may force arbitrary 

Ube changes upon a people, but 

ffinai whether, through moral sua- 

©ueetion 

sion, it may introduce ideas, 
principles, and potencies that will inevitably 
bring about wholesome changes for which 
a people itself in the end will be grateful. 
Can any one question the benignity of pres- 
ent endeavors in China to overcome the 
worse by the better? And is not China in- 
creasingly friendly to such results? If not, 



of fmtggtong [iqi] 

why has the queen dowager abolished the 
examinations of the old style and intro- 
duced instead the new Western education? 
Why has she discouraged foot binding, pro- 
mulgated a Sabbath rest-day, and taken steps 
toward the abolition of the opium curse? 
Are Chang Chi Tung, author of " China's 
Only Hope," and Yuen Shih Kai less pa- 
triotic because, discerning that the vitalities 
of Western nations are largely due to mod- 
ern and Christian thought, they have issued 
decrees encouraging the millions over whom 
they rule now to study the new world, in- 
cluding not only the modern sciences, but 
also Western constitutional government? 
They have discovered that these Western 
things are not ethnic, that they are pan- 
ethnic, and so of course that they are Mon- 
golian. If so, then any displacement they 
may work will result in the betterment of 
China. Of course, all this involves over- 
throw, but legitimate overthrow of the in- 
fantine by the mature, of the false by the 
true, and ultimately of the heathen by the 



[iq2] TTbe Bivfne IRIflbt 

Christian. For this purpose the world and 
all its dispensations were made, that through 
turnings and overturnings the true destinies 
of mankind consonant with the manifesta- 
tion of the divine glory, may be realized. 

With such aims then, Christian missions 
are chartered to go anywhere upon this 
planet, possessing the same right that the 
Redeemer himself had to come here, and to 
lay hold of the poor Indian fakir, the 
wretched superstitious Chinese Boxer, the 
bestial South Sea cannibal, and every other 
type of human degradation peculiar to 
" Satan's castaways," and to set themselves 
to the task of displacing all error by truth, 
and bringing men everywhere to their own. 

A charter attested as is that of Christian 
missions, has in it limitless power of self- 
commendation, and may well 

Christianity . . 

seefts mo seek universal hospitality tor 

Conquest of . ^ 

^ orce its renewing message. Grant- 
ing that Christianity is a re- 
ligion possessing the qualities I have claimed 
for it in the first part of this discussion, can 



of flntssiong [103] 

it justify itself in undertaking anything less 
than the presentation of these values, these 
potentialities to the whole world ? Can it do 
less than give what it has of the best? 

Until recent times, if we except the apos- 
tolic period, no system of religion, Oriental 
or Occidental, as practically held, has al- 
lowed itself to make universal effort in be- 
half of others. The West has been arrayed 
against the East, and the East against the 
West, in a mutual exclusiveness of suspicion 
that one or the other must wholly triumph or 
wholly succumb to the mastery of the other. 
As a mark of this attitude, recall the note- 
worthy work of Meredith Townsend on 
" Asia and Europe." Large place is given in 
this book to the question whether or not Eu- 
rope is likely to conquer Asia. The deeper 
question to which Mr. Townsend does little 
justice is this: Has Europe, has Christen- 
dom, the moral power — the motive — to bless 
the world in such a way that neither Europe 
nor Asia will desire any conquest, but one of 
love and grace? 



[iQ4] XEbe Wivinc TRiflbt 

President Charles Cuthbert Hall (now 
translated) lately returned from his second 

visit to the far East. On this 
Embarrassments visit he had rare opportunity 

to feel the moral pulse of In- 
dia, China, and Japan. In a recent address, 
given before the American Board of Com- 
missioners in Cleveland, he expressed the 
strong conviction which all Western travel- 
ers in those lands must share, that one of 
the chief hindrances to missionary endeavor 
is an embarrassment which springs out of 
the political situation. A great multitude in 
all those lands continue to stand outside the 
missionary community because, however 
worthy they deem the enterprise of mis- 
sions in itself to be, they do not feel free 
to identify themselves with a movement 
which is after all managed by Europeans, or 
at the least by foreigners. This foreigner 
is feared, whether he comes from Britain, 
from France, from Germany, from Russia, 
or even from the United States. 

Many Orientals who are secretly in 



of flfltgsfong [105] 

sympathy with the Lord Jesus Christ, and 
with the best things represented by the 
Christian community, are still loth to be 
known as Christians, because in so doing 
they would be identified by their countrymen 
with foreigners and with various forms of 
foreign abuses. These abuses have re- 
peatedly stung their proud spirits, and as 
Orientals conscious of great histories, ex- 
tending over millenniums of time behind 
them, they do not easily forget those dis- 
graceful chapters in the treatment accorded 
to their fathers by Western adventurers and 
freebooters. These influences, together with 
a fair modicum of race prejudice, common to 
man, hold Orientals back from a committal 
to a religion which is offered them from the 
West, although the religion itself is really 
distinctively Eastern. 

There is great pertinency in the point 
raised by Doctor Hall, a point which Mr. 
Townsend in his book might well have con- 
sidered with real magnanimity. Neverthe- 
less, the fact remains that Christianity in 



[iq6] Ube S)ix>lne TRtgbt 

itself, in its essential purity, disconnected 
from things European which may have prej- 
udiced it, is the hope of the world, be- 
cause it is a religion really neither Eastern 
nor Western, but human, pan-ethnic ; and as 
such there is in it innate capacity to bring 
the manhood of both hemispheres, and of 
all races into conformity to the character 
of God as seen in his Son Jesus Christ ; and 
so also into one broad spiritual communion. 

From this point of view, if the positions 
laid down in the preceding pages are sound, 

Ube asenfcm the matter of mere physical or 

purpose racial conquest as between any 
of mitestons 

two peoples, is wholly irrele- 
vant. The question at the bottom is : Has 
any people on the globe a message of such 
benignity, that if it were communicated to 
all the races of the world, it would result 
in a federation of mankind, a federation 
deeper than the mere brotherhood of man; 
such a federation as would eventually be a 
communion of saints? It is our firm belief 



of flfttegtons [107] 

that Christianity has, nay, that Christ him- 
self is, that message. 

The work of foreign missions up to this 
time, and especially during the past century, 
has been that of blazing the path to the 
discovery of ways and means whereby hu- 
manity may get together and find its real 
salvation, salvation in every sense. Grant 
that in the efforts made some blunders have 
occurred; that the means employed have 
been inadequate ; even that little more than 
the sowing of the seed of the coming of 
the kingdom of God has been accomplished. 
Yet the effort has been an earnest one, a 
sincere one, and on the whole an effective 
one. The humblest inquirers in this realm 
are those who have labored hardest and 
sacrificed most to get their message under- 
stood among the idolatrous and agnostic 
races. Our contention, however, is that 
nothing less than has been done could have 
been done, and the Christian church have re- 
mained really Christian, or really human, and 
particularly in the face of the great provi- 



[io8] CTe gtvtne TRtgbt 

dential changes that have occurred in the 
mighty East within the past half-century. 
The reason why Christianity could not have 
done less is precisely this : That when 
understood, Christianity has in it such ele- 
ments as we have noted, elements in them- 
selves of untold value, and universally ap- 
plicable to mankind. Like Paul, its great 
exponent, it holds these spiritual values in 
trust for others who are in need. 

To recapitulate: Christianity holds the 
supreme conception of the oneness of man- 
kind; it alone cherishes the 
IRecapitulatton 

idea of a redemptive purpose 

— a cure for sin — at the heart of God; it 
places a premium upon the faith principle 
conceived as loyalty to present light; it is 
the one religion which centers in a unique 
divine-human person; it alone guarantees 
human well-being in providence irrespective 
of outward, circumstantial conditions; and 
it affords the only practical hope of god- 
like character and final blessedness like his 
own. 



of missions [109] 

The ideal of all we plead for is concretely 
presented in the New Testament picture of 
our Lord's transfiguration. moral 

This transfiguration is really «wn««flttwtton 

& J tbe loeal 

the archetypal form of that 

characteristic work of redemption wherein 
mankind and all that belongs to him are to 
be transformed into the same glory which 
Christ himself exhibited in the holy mount. 
The scene is best understood when viewed 
in contrast with another scene, viz., that in 
the plain, just following it. 

Two types of sonship are presented: 
That of Jesus in the glory ensuing upon his 
full acceptance of his impending cross, con- 
cerning which the Father, speaking right 
out of the blue, exclaimed : " This is my 
Son, my chosen " — " the ideal potentiality I 
cherish for all men, what I mean by son- 
ship." The other type is seen in the child 
of a broken-hearted earthly father whom 
the disciples through default in prayer had 
failed to heal. This was a son of the natural 
man — the limited human father — plus all 



[no] Ube Wtvine TRlQbt 

the damage sin and the demon had wrought 
in him. He was " lunatic," torn by the 
spirit, fallen at the Saviour's feet " as one 
dead " ; he " wallowed, foaming." There 
he lay, a devil's masterpiece — sin in the 
death-process. The acme of distress ut- 
tered itself in the father's cry : " I beseech 
thee, look upon my son ; for he is mine only 
child " — literally, mine " only begotten " ; 
the same word that describes the relation 
of Jesus to his Father. How different the 
fatherhoods, and how unlike the sonships, in 
these contrasting pictures! Now, all this 
may be regarded as a dramatization of the 
task of Christ's successors in this sinful 
world. This task is naught less than to take 
human souls stricken and damaged by sin, 
and to begin to transfigure them— to change 
them from prostrate, sin-cursed, earthly son- 
ship to radiant, glorified, heavenly sonship 
like Christ's own, idealized in that mount. 
This transfiguration was not for Christ 
alone. He is but " the firstborn of many 
brethren." The transfiguration was for all 



ot Amissions [in] 

men and for all theirs. It is for the poor 
Indian fakir, the crazed superstitious Chi- 
nese Boxer, the gross South Sea cannibal, 
the barbarous African savage, and the just 
as needy, though polished, Anglo-Saxon 
agnostic. This transfiguration amounts to 
salvation — Christian salvation, the only sal- 
vation worthy of God and of ourselves. 
Moreover, this salvation can never be ade- 
quately known or consciously realized apart 
from that wisdom and power which are 
lodged in the cross of Christ and its gos- 
pel. To bring such a salvation to men the 
Christian church not only has the right, but 
is bound, in the appropriate " times and sea- 
sons," to go everywhere upon this planet 
where the Redeemer himself would come. 
This warrant and duty are the charter of the 
Christian church; the right to love where 
others hate, to cherish where others neglect, 
to bless where others curse, to offer felicity 
in this world and the world to come where 
others consign to darkness and despair. 
This is the right divine, the redemptive right 



[n2] Zbc Divine TRigbt 

to communicate the grace of Christian mis- 
sions. There is then a divine right of mis- 
sions; and if so, a human right also to 
propagate them, as the human right becomes 
conformed to the divine. 



id 1 ! 

Itpl 



of amissions [113] 



HppenMi 

BxtraorMnars Bbortainai 
UraMtions 

1 HE day we received the first Muhso for 
baptism, two teachers of this tribe from 
China, together with about sixty followers, 
came to the compound. They said : " We 
have been traveling for fourteen years 
preaching to the Muhsos to turn from all 
evil and follow after righteousness, be- 
cause the true God is coming soon." 1 They 
said they had been searching for the true 
God for years, and had just found him. 
Five days later another Muhso teacher came 
with a large following, and the first two men 
came back also. The interest was most pro- 
found. The people seemed intensely in ear- 
nest and every one professed to believe fully 

1 Extract from a report from Rev. W. M. Young, 
missionary of the American Baptist Missionary Union. 
Kengtung, Burma. 

H 



["4] BppenM* 

the message that we gave them. They then 
told us the Muhso traditions. They are 
very similar to the Karen traditions, and in 
some respects they are even clearer. Their 
account of the creation, the fall, and the 
flood, corresponds very closely with the 
biblical account ; and their teaching against 
evil-doing corresponds with remarkable ac- 
curacy to the Ten Commandments of the 
Mosaic law. They give more precepts, but 
the teaching is almost identical; they say 
God once dwelt among men, that he has 
gone away, but that he is coming again, and 
those who refuse to receive his truth will be 
cast into hell, Ma Na Hok, when he comes. 
The belief seems well-nigh universal among 
them that the foreigner would bring them 
the knowledge of the true God, and there 
is an intense longing on the part of many for 
such a revelation. 

About six years ago they began to build 
small chapels in which they met on new and 
full moons to worship, and these are now 
found in hundreds of towns. TheMuhsos had 



Bppenfrfx [us] 

certain paper offerings and paper streamers, 
offerings of popped rice, the burning of 
tapers, etc., which they said indicated two 
things : that they implored the protection of 
God, and also expressed the longing of their 
hearts for a knowledge of the true God. 
They said the foreigner would soon come 
to teach them. They also wore cotton cords 
about their wrists and in some cases about 
the neck. These were, first, a pledge that 
they would not forsake the Muhso customs 
of belief in one God, or drink liquor, or fol- 
low after any evil ; and, secondly, the cords 
expressed the longing that the foreigner 
would come and teach them the knowledge 
of the true God, and then he would cut them 
from their wrists. When I visited the first 
villages where they had the chapels, they 
voluntarily carried all the offerings out, say- 
ing : " We have now found the true God 
and have no further need of these." The 
Muhso teacher came to me in the presence 
of all the people of the village and said: 
" We have now found the true God ; you 



[n6] Bppenftts 

cut these cords from my wrists." I did so, 
and every person in the village came at once 
and I cut all their cords. That meant a 
complete break from the past customs, and a 
full and complete acceptance of the new 
teaching. They accepted every Christian 
precept that I presented to them ; and then, 
after a unanimous vote, we held a formal 
service dedicating the chapel to the Lord. 
Since then I have cut the cords from the 
wrists of hundreds of people. 

Some things are very remarkable about 
these simple mountain people. They are 
pure monotheists and do not believe in 
or make offerings to evil spirits; they are 
less bound by superstitions than any other 
tribe of Burma; in some sections they are 
addicted to drunkenness, but this is strictly 
forbidden by their tribal customs ; they are 
pure monogamists, polygamy not being tol- 
erated. Some say they would punish a polyg- 
amist or bigamist with death, while others 
say he would be driven from the village. 
My Karen helpers say the Muhsos will make 



BppenMs ["7] 

better Christians than the Karens because 
of this freedom from superstitions ; and then 
they are naturally of a more teachable spirit. 
It is certain that this Muhso population 
is much larger, probably several times 
larger, in China than in Kentung. I have 
the names of eighteen local States in China 
where the Muhsos and Kwes dwell, some of 
which States it is said, are larger than 
Kengtung. It gives an immense field for 
work, which undoubtedly must be enlarged 
to the north and northeast as soon as possi- 
ble, since it is certain now that thousands 
will accept Christ as soon as the gospel can 
be clearly presented to them. 



MAY 19 1908 



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